• Using RPG As Your ASP Language, Part 1

  April 28, 2004 Howard F. Arner, Jr., and Holley Davis

  I have a weird rule about evaluating new software that has served me well throughout my career. If I can’t make the software do something useful or interesting in the first hour, it sucks. And I deduct points if I actually have to read the manual. As many of you know, I am not an RPG programmer. When I program on the iSeries, I use the C compiler. For programming client applications that talk to the iSeries, I use Visual Basic or Prolog, or I program in C.

  

  I know enough RPG to be very dangerous, like a toddler with

  …

  Read more

• Keep Your Users Informed

  April 28, 2004 Hey, Ted

  Although we run an ERP package, we have plenty of homegrown programs that fill holes in the package. Most of them produce reports that the package doesn’t offer us. Sometimes a user keys runtime information into a prompt screen and presses a function key to submit a request to batch. However, if the results don’t come off the printer PDQ, the user may submit another request, thinking the first one was not accepted. How can we inform the user that the request was received?

  

  –George

  Your problem reminds me of something I’ve noticed: that homegrown software often does a poor

  …

  Read more

• Find Database Records with Invalid Dates

  April 28, 2004 Hey, Ted

  We store dates in YYYYMMDD format in packed decimal fields in our database. This served us well when we wrote all our applications in green-screen RPG. Now that we’re using other technologies, invalid dates (like all zeros, all nines, or April 31) cause us problems. Is there a way in SQL to test the validity of a date? Something similar to RPG’s TEST op code with the D extender would be great.

  

  –Kenny

  I don’t know of an SQL function that will tell you whether a numeric field contains a valid date, so I wrote one.

  Use the method of

  …

  Read more

• OS/400 Alert: Googlize Your Enterprise

  April 28, 2004 Shannon O'Donnell

  In a great example of the chicken coming before the egg, a software vendor, whose entire reputation has been built on the quality and accuracy of its software, is now moving into the hardware business by hardwiring its software into its new hardware. Google, the world’s leading Internet search engine vendor, is now offering hardware to allow your company to move into the search engine business. Intrigued? Read on!

  

  GOOGLIZE YOUR BUSINESS

  Google.com is rapidly becoming the de facto search engine of the entire Internet, easily outpacing its nearest competitor, Yahoo. One of the primary reasons for this success

  …

  Read more

• Smooth the Java Journey with Struts

  April 21, 2004 David Morris

  Building enterprise-level Web applications is no easy task. There are many ways to present data, control application flow, model data, and organize applications. Fortunately, aspiring Web architects can use tried- and-proven design patterns to avoid the pitfalls of others. The most important design pattern for Web architects is called Model-View-Controller. The MVC design pattern separates applications into three types of components. Model components support data retrieval from a database or other source. View components support the way data is presented to the user or the view. And controller components control the flow of the application.

  

  The main reason to use

  …

  Read more

• Programming with Assertions

  April 21, 2004 Cletus the Codeslinger

  I am amazed to see how much programmers take for granted. For example, I have worked on many programs in which the author had assumed that an RPG CHAIN operation (a random read) would always find the sought-for record. Occasionally I have to fix a program that ended abnormally because it attempted to divide by zero. The authors of such programs assumed that the divisor would never be zero, but somehow such a thing happened.

  

  To help deal with the problem of assumptions, I have been using assertions in my code. An assertion is a program statement that tests an

  …

  Read more

• Make a CL Program or Module Retrieve Its Name

  April 21, 2004 Hey, Ted

  As if I didn’t have enough to do, I wasted an hour on a wild goose chase. A user contacted me when a program cancelled. The message she received told her that program XYZ had ended abnormally. It took me a while to determine that program ABC had cancelled instead. It turned out that ABC was a clone of XYZ and still included the following, misleading CL command.

  

  SNDPGMMSG  MSGID(CPF9898) MSGF(QCPFMSG) MSGDTA('Program +
                XYZ ended abnormally') MSGTYPE(*ESCAPE)     
  

  I would like to make CL programs determine their own names, so that I can make sure each program reports the correct name

  …

  Read more

• Admin Alert: When Management Central Server Won’t Start

  April 21, 2004 Joe Hertvik

  In 2002, I wrote an article on how to troubleshoot IBM’s OS/400 V5R1 Management Central GUI when it simply refuses to start. The Management Central GUI is used for a number of valuable OS/400 functions, including graphing performance data, running commands on other systems, and synchronizing PTFs between iSeries boxes.

  

  The problem is that the Management Central GUI can be fussy, and there are a number of parameters that need to be correctly set in order to make it run. As I explained in my earlier article, these issues include having an enabled QSECOFR user profile and defining your iSeries

  …

  Read more

• OS/400 Alert: Microsoft Extends the Life of JVM

  April 21, 2004 Shannon O'Donnell

  It really is true that the more things change, the more they stay the same. Just when you were getting used to the idea that Microsoft would be suddenly and precipitously dropping its JVM in September, Microsoft announces that it’s extending the JVM for another three years. Get out your score cards, folks! Also in this issue, we’ll point you to a cool new tool that lets you test multiple operation systems on a single PC.

  

  THE MICROSOFT-SUN YO-YO

  Not long ago, Microsoft announced that it would end support of the Microsoft Java Virtual Machine in September. This was, of

  …

  Read more

• Stop Hard-Coding Before It Stops You

  April 14, 2004 Kevin Vandever

  It drives me nuts. How can it be that month-end reports don’t run correctly all of sudden? These same programs run every month, and no one has modified them in years. Now the numbers are all wrong, and the you-know-what has rolled downhill, all the way from the CFO’s desk, and has landed smack dab in the earpiece of my telephone. Ouch! Yuk!

  

  Sound familiar? Of course it does. It’s probably happened to all of you out there. It happened to me as recently as last week.

  These crashes and errors don’t just affect month-end processes. They can happen to

  …

  Read more

Previous Articles Next Articles