Timothy Prickett Morgan
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PHP and IBM i: Ten Years of Magic
September 28, 2016 Amy Anderson
… Read moreThe online world recently celebrated the 25th anniversary of the World Wide Web. Young adults entering the workforce today have never known life without it. But for those who were working on green screen terminals in the mid-1990s and saw for the first time what a modem-connected PC could deliver, the World Wide Web was indistinguishable from magic.
And the ability to deliver magic exploded with the emergence of a development language originally called PHP/FI. Originally created by Rasmus Lerdorf in 1994, PHP stood for personal home pages and form interpreter. It gave a new class of developers, called webmasters,
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How To Replace MOVE And MOVEL With Subprocedures
September 27, 2016 Ted Holt
… Read moreNote: The code accompanying this article is available for download here.
Google “what shall we do about” and you’ll find a lot of issues that people are concerned about. Now that RPG has gone fully free-form, the question of concern for RPG programmers is “what shall we do about MOVE and MOVEL?” Faithful reader Mark sent me a solution he used in his shop and gave me permission to pass it along in case it may be of help to you.
I can think of two ways to replace MOVE and MOVEL with free-form code. The first is to
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A Brief Introduction To The SQL Procedures Language
September 27, 2016 Ted Holt
… Read moreThe SQL Procedures Language, or SQL PL, is a proprietary procedural language that IBM designed to work with the DB2 family of database management systems. I believe that it’s a good idea for anyone who works with DB2 to learn SQL PL. If you know RPG, CL, or COBOL, you’ll find it easy to learn.
SQL PL is available for all the DB2s. Knowledge of SQL PL that you acquire by working with DB2 for i applies in large part to the mainframe and LUW (Linux-Unix-Windows) versions. You can use SQL PL to create stored procedures, functions, and triggers. You
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RPG Talks To Watson
September 27, 2016 Paul Tuohy
… Read moreNote: The code accompanying this article is available for download here.
Yes, RPG can talk to Watson. No special software required, nothing to install, nothing to configure. You just need to be on V7R1, have the ability to use embedded SQL and write just a few lines of code–none of which are complicated. To see how it works, all you have to do is copy/paste the display file and RPG code in this article, compile and call.
On the off chance that you don’t know what Watson is, Watson is the IBM computer that, in 2011, competed
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With Avnet Deal, Tech Data Spans From Glass House To Your House
September 26, 2016 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreAnd then there were three. For the past several years, the two dominant master resellers of Power-based systems–that would be Avnet and Arrow Electronics–who also sell a whole lot of other kinds of IT gear into datacenters, got a little competition from Tech Data and Ingram Micro joined the fray and started peddling Power gear and related storage.
Rather than compete with Avnet, Tech Data decided to shell out a whole lot of money to buy its Technology Solutions division, thus vaulting itself into a better competitive position in the IT distribution business relative to Arrow and making it
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New OpenPower Servers Present Interesting IBM i Possibilities
September 19, 2016 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreIt seems increasingly likely to us that over the long haul IBM will get out of manufacturing all but the largest of its Power-based servers and its System z mainframe line, which by definition is big iron. There are a number of implications of this strategy for IBM i shops, of course, but let’s be honest here. Connect the dots and this seems inevitable.
Back in the AS/400 days, IBM made a custom machine, complete with homegrown processors and auxiliary compute, its own memory, and its own disk drives. When IBM started converging the AS400 and RS/6000 lines on the
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Generate SELECT For All Columns
September 13, 2016 Hey, Mike
… Read moreI have a table with a long list of column names and I want to build a SELECT statement from the catalog metadata. If I supply schema (library) and table (physical file) names, is there a way to generate a SELECT statement?
—Four Hundred Guru Reader
Thanks to dynamic compound statements and global variables, the answer is yes, it’s fairly easy to construct a SQL statement for a table or view as shown below:
/* Build Select Statement and stuff it in QGPL.TEMPSQL variable */ BEGIN -- Fill in your table/schema name DECLARE @TABLE_NAME VARCHAR(128) NOT NULL DEFAULT 'SYSCOLUMNS'; -
Determine The State Of The Error
September 13, 2016 Ted Holt
… Read moreThe SQL Procedures Language (SQL PL) has an effective error-handling mechanism–condition handlers. When a statement returns a certain SQL state or a certain type of exception, the condition handler takes control. However, determining which SQL state to test for can be problematic. Here are two ways.
Let’s start with a simple stored procedure.
Create or replace procedure CreatePlants begin create table plants ( ID dec(3), Location varchar(16), primary key (ID)); label on table plants is 'Plant master'; insert into plants values ( 1, 'Lost Angeles'), ( 2, 'New Yolk'), ( 3, 'Last Vegas'); end
What could go wrong? Well, the
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How Do You Do That With RDi? Part 1: Copy A Source Member
September 13, 2016 Susan Gantner
… Read moreI’m an RDi fan. I make no secret about that. Even so I occasionally find things that I need to do that just seem easier or faster to do with PDM in the green screen. I don’t really mind that. I nearly always have a green screen session sitting just next to my RDi workbench anyway. But when I can find a way to do a function as easily in RDi, I prefer to do that so that I don’t need to switch modes as much.
This tip is the first in a series on things that I find some
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IBM Updates Rational Developer With Mac OS, Other Goodies
September 12, 2016 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreIf you like creating applications in the Rational Developer for i integrated development environment, and you also like Apple Macs, then IBM has a release update for you.
In announcement letter 216-143, Big Blue said that it was making the Mac OS client a peer to Windows and Linux machines with the V9.5.1 update to the RDi tool. To be ultra precise, RDi is now compatible with Mac OS X 10.11. IBM warns that some functions of RDi, such as program verifiers and syntax checkers, are not available on Mac OS, and it is not clear when or if