Timothy Prickett Morgan
-
Where In The World Is IBM i?
February 29, 2016 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreIn case you did not notice it, there is a new year here in 2016 and Big Blue has spent what must have been a fortune putting a new mobile-tuned website together for itself. I am going to show my age a bit here, but mobile formats are fine for a phone, and on a web screen they might be slick and slippery, but they are also shouty and devoid of actual data. Call me a misplaced man of letters, but I like text.
Just for the hell of it, I went poking around the new IBM website to see
-
Payday For The People Who Make The IBM i Go
February 29, 2016 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreIn our ongoing series on the people who run and program the IBM i platform and the industries where they work, we are now going to finally get to the meat of the issue: Payday for programming. Moola for managing. Greenbacks for greenscreens and for converting greenscreens to modern web and mobile interfaces. The reason why you get out of bed in the morning and go to your respective and respected work.
The data is pretty thin about salaries out there in IBM Midrange Land, but luckily for us Bob Langieri, president of Excel Technical Services and a long-time recruiter
-
XML-INTO And Optional Elements
February 23, 2016 Hey, Jon
… Read moreNote: The code accompanying this article is available for download here.
I am working on an RPG program that does some very basic pre-processing of an XML document before passing it along to another program for final processing. Even though my program works, it fills up the job log with error messages. Can you help me get rid of them?
The XML is structured like this.
<Message> <Payload> <Event>. . . </Event> </Payload> </Message>
The <Payload> element can contain a child element of <Event>, <Report>, or <Parameter>. Only one of these elements is ever contained in the message at
-
SBMJOB, CALL, And Decimal Parameters
February 23, 2016 Ted Holt
… Read moreIn spite of my great admiration for the IBM i operating system, I have to admit it has its idiosyncrasies. One of them, which has been there since Day 1, is the way the Submit Job (SBMJOB) command reformats decimal parameters of the CALL command. Fortunately, a relatively recent addition to CL provides an easy way to deal with this quirk.
Assume a CL program calls an RPG program, passing along two decimal variables and a character variable.
dcl &Option *char 1 dcl &Account *dec 5 dcl &ThruDate *dec 7 call AR100R (&Account &ThruDate &Option)
One day you are told
-
PHP Crash Course For RPG Developers
February 23, 2016 Chris Ringer
… Read moreSuppose your boss tasks you with grabbing and processing some XML from an HTTP request to create a new customer order. If you have a “deer in the headlights” expression on your face, don’t fear, you don’t have to punt this request over the cubicle wall to the web developers. Without weeks or months of training, you can build a PHP script to retrieve the XML data that RPG can parse.
What is PHP?
PHP is a full-featured scripting language that runs on a web server. Just type your PHP code in a text editor (even Notepad), save it on
-
The Job Market For The People Who Make The IBM i Go
February 22, 2016 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreLike you, we are trying to understand the current state of the IBM i community. Thus far in 2016, we have taken several looks at the dicing and slicing of the latest IBM i Marketplace Survey compiled by HelpSystems as well as providing our own insight into what industries are represented by the IBM i base and how that compares to historical data. We also did our best to try to case the distribution of system admins and programmers in the IBM i base.
This week, we want to take a look at the job market for the people in
-
IBM Wheels And Deals On Big Iron Compute And Memory
February 15, 2016 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreWith the Power8 processors having been on the market in IBM‘s Power Systems machines for nearly two years now, and Intel widely expected to launch its “Broadwell” Xeon server processors within the next few months, you might think that Big Blue would be out there wheeling and dealing, offering all kinds of clever deals to try to keep machines moving.
Maybe IBM’s sales force is doing this, and maybe its resellers are doing this, but the past two years during the Power8 generation have been the most quiet ones I can remember when it comes to a lack of
-
Use SQL To Change A Substring
February 9, 2016 Ted Holt
… Read moreOccasionally I need to change part of a string value in a database table. SQL has three mechanisms that let me accomplish such a thing. Do you know what those three mechanisms are and how to use them?
First, we need a table for illustrative purposes.
create table Parts ( ID char(6) primary key, Description varchar(40), Cost dec (5,2), Price dec (5,2)); insert into parts values ('XX-101', '20-inch Doodad', 0.12, 0.25), ('XX-105', '2-foot Doodad left-hand', 0.48, 0.75), ('XX-106', '2-foot Doodad right-hand', 0.48, 0.75), ('XX-118', '12-foot Doodad', 1.25, 3.00), ('BA-101', '5CM Widget', 0.30, 0.45), ('BA-104', '15Cm Widget', 1.00, 1.35), ('BA-111', '150cm -
IBM i and .Net Connectivity With XMLSERVICE
February 9, 2016 Richard Schoen
… Read moreMany businesses are looking for ways to modernize their IBM i applications while maximizing their existing code investments in RPG or COBOL applications. Some contend that using Microsoft development technologies is a bad way to go. They think it promotes replacement of existing IBM i applications or of IBM i itself.
My position has always been that PCs and Microsoft technology are a great way to enhance existing IBM i applications. XMLSERVICE and Microsoft Visual Studio are open source technologies your company can use to modernize, enhance, and augment your existing IBM i code base.
Using Microsoft .Net with XMLSERVICE
-
The Jobs Of The People Who Make IBM i Platforms Work
February 8, 2016 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreWe spend a lot of time talking about hardware and software here at IT Jungle, but there is another crucial element to the platform that often gets overlooked: the people who turn the machines into applications and, in turn, money from which they derive their many livings. The systems have evolved on the confluence of Moore’s Law advancement curves for their constituent components, but if people want to advance, they have to work hard to keep pace with new technology while maintaining the old.
The whole point of the System/38, and its follow on, the AS/400 and its successors,