RPG expert Aaron Bartell is spearheading a new open source development project called RPGUI that aims to radically simplify the development of Web interfaces for RPG programs and programmers. The project is only about a month old, and there is a lot of work to do. But Bartell is very optimistic about RPGUI’s prospects for eliminating the need for RPG programmers to become experts in Web languages such as JavaScript, and to provide a “no brainer” low-cost option for keeping RPG applications looking modern.

Like many RPG programmers, Bartell professes a love for the language and the overall simplicity of

Profound Logic‘s Atrium is now in the building. Last week the i OS toolmaker announced the general availability of the new Web portal, which provides a single repository where users can access all of their Web-enabled or modernized green-screen i OS applications. The product, which was first introduced in early 2009 at the COMMON conference in Nevada, also gained new functionality from the beta release in the area of macros.

Atrium is an i OS application portal that runs within a Web browser and provides centralized access to Web-enabled applications. The software is all about speed and safety: The

SpoolFlex developer DRV Technologies last week unveiled a new product designed to ensure that important i OS system messages get in front of the eyes of operators and administrators, through e-mail or messaging software on the Web or a smartphone. Just as the company’s flagship product, SpoolFlex, automates the distribution of spool files, the new MessageFlex product automates the distribution of errors and other messages generated by the system to help avoid downtime.

MessageFlex monitors all i OS message queues for important messages, such as a failed backup or a problem with DASD. When an important message arrives, MessageFlex automatically

System i Developer Sets Date for Next RPG & DB2 Summit

RPG is dead. Long live RPG. Repeat. Chug beer. Write more code. RPG is not going away anytime soon. The amount of RPG code running businesses, if laid end to end, would stretch from Earth to the farthest galaxy–give or take a few light years. Yes, some of that code is as old as the dinosaurs. So how does a 50-year-old programming language survive in a high tech world where most “innovations” have the staying power of a lit firecracker? Evolution.

Those that don’t know RPG from TGIF have

i365 yesterday launched a new software as a service (SaaS) enablement program for independent software vendors (ISVs) called the EVault Cloud-Connected Services Platform (EC2S). The Seagate subsidiary aims to leverage its investment and experience from designing and operating the EVault online backup, storage, and data recovery business to tackle the burgeoning market for general-purpose cloud computing, which is expected to generate nearly $10 billion in revenue this year.

The term “cloud computing” took the popular lexicon by storm last year, and quickly became the go-to word for hype-happy enterprise product peddlers, who applied it to nearly everything that connects to

System i VAR Abacus Solutions last month unveiled a new program that gives customers moving from older releases of i5/OS the chance to test their applications on IBM i 6.1. The hope is that, after the 61 day test is over, the customer will be ready to upgrade production systems to i 6.1, while keeping downtime to a minimum.

The 61-day test drive begins by uploading a replica of the customer’s System i production environment onto a similarly configured server located at Abacus Solutions’ facility. The reseller’s engineers then execute the upgrade process, while fully documenting the steps taken and

The new TBT-1000 terminal unveiled by 10ZiG Technology last week is an ideal replacement for green-screen terminals, and will be marketed heavily toward the vendor’s System i customer base, 10ZiG says.

The TBT-1000 features a 1 GHz processor, uses the Linux operating system, and supports touch screen displays and a range of legacy ports for connecting to peripherals, says 10ZiG. The device, which 10ZiG has listed at $199, is a bare-bones Ethernet terminal out-of-the-box. A mouse isn’t even required.

But the TBT-1000 can be upgraded with things like support for VMware View 4 and support for PCoIP, which future-proofs the

Open Text is the latest ISV to partner up with Attunity for its line of real-time data integration products. As a result of the deal, Open Text hopes to bolster its capability to help customers decommission their legacy content management applications and accelerate the adoption of Open Text’s ECM suite.

Attunity specializes in developing real-time data integration software called change data capture (CDC) that supports DB2/400, IBM mainframes, Oracle, Microsoft SQL Server, and other enterprise database platforms. The company claims that its log-based CDC technology has very little impact on the host, which gives it an advantage over other

Kingland Systems, a developer of financial services software for i OS and other platforms, is embedding IBM‘s Infosphere Master Data Management (MDM) software into 360 Data, its global database of legal entities, corporate hierarchies, and securities, the vendors announced last week.

Based in Clear Lake, Iowa, Kingland Systems provides an array of software and services to its customers, which are some of the biggest financial services firms in the country. The company’s offerings include brokerage software, compliance and risk management services, data management services, and various other technical and hosting services.

Kingland is also a big IBM Power

In a product announcement that was perhaps more suited to last weeks’ Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas than this week’s National Retail Federation show in New York City, Sterling Commerce yesterday unveiled a pair of new mobile e-commerce applications designed to be used by–you guessed it–consumers.

The transformation of Sterling Commerce, which is best known among OS/400 shops for its Gentran Integration Suite line of EDI translation software, has been going on for some time. Several years ago, the AT&T subsidiary announced plans to branch out of its market niche for EDI and B2B e-commerce enablement tools by developing