Timothy Prickett Morgan
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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,
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Yet Another IBM Pricing Scheme For Power MSPs
February 1, 2016 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreOne of the problems with hardware is that it is a sunk capital cost to acquire it, which is why financing and now cloud computing, where you lease or rent the capacity in a server or storage array rather than buy it, is popular. But the service providers building Power-based clouds are not always happy to do financing. They want IBM to offer flexible pricing without them having to take the risk.
And so, several times over the past couple of years, Big Blue has offered special pricing for systems software and hardware to managed service providers. In announcement letter
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Big IBM i Shops Get Beefier Memory
February 1, 2016 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreWhile there is no question that the installed base of OS/400, i5/OS and IBM i machinery in the world–probably something on the order of 150,000 machines–is dominated by small machines with one or two processors and only a couple of cores at most activated, there are still some very, very large customers out there. These companies are driving the performance requirements for Power Systems iron, just like big AIX and Linux shops are doing.
While all of the world gets in a tizzy over in-memory processing, the single-level storage architecture of the System/38’s CPF and the AS/400’s OS/400 make this
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Run VisualAge RPG Applications On 64-bit Windows 7, 8, And 10 Over The LAN
January 26, 2016 Dan Devoe
… Read moreWith assurance of continued support from IBM, we used VisualAge RPG (VARPG) to develop modern business applications. Then IBM pulled the plug on VARPG. Nevertheless, we’ve kept our applications working, and have even managed to find a way to run them under 64-bit Windows from our LAN. Here’s how we did it.
A Little Background
Around a decade ago, we were looking for a way to put a modern interface on our 5250-based applications. We really liked what VisualAge RPG (VARPG) had to offer. We found many reasons to lean toward this solution, but the most enticing ones were