mPainter, the GUI customization tool that’s part of mrc‘s mPower suite, has been overhauled to support the Web’s latest HTML5 standard. Along with HTML5 support, mPainter gains a host of other new features designed to make it easier to spruce up the look of the automatically generated, Java-based mPower programs.

mPainter plays an important role in the mPower suite. The Web-based product is used to tweak and alter the Java servlet-based GUIs that are automatically generated by mPower, such as by adding graphics, company logos, maps, drop-down boxes, popups, hover boxes, lists, or other visual elements that the customer

Mobile application development isn’t always what you think it is. Real IBM i business applications that render on the most popular tablets and smartphones, for instance, do not require RPG programmers to learn HTML5, CSS3, PHP, JavaScript, Java, or Objective-C. Last week, LANSA released a tool for creating apps using RPG/CL with DDS. Those apps will run natively on iPhone and iPad devices now and Android compatibility will be added within a couple of months.

LANSA calls this new product LongRange, which is not to be confused with LongReach, the free iOS file-sharing client that LANSA launched late last year

It’s a big, bad, scary world out there. Cyber-criminals are constantly probing networks, looking for places to plant malware and do their nasty business. To thwart these attempts, an organization needs a good security plan, and possibly invest in a security information and event management (SIEM) program that monitors and correlates all IT activity. Townsend Security recently issued a new release of its Alliance LogAgent Suite that will help protect the IBM i platform by providing SIEMs with more detailed and fine-grained IBM i log data.

Townsend Security president Patrick Townsend began his COMMON press conference last week with a

Raz-Lee Security has been on a roll lately. Earlier this year, it launched DB-Gate, which makes external databases like SQL Server, Oracle 11g, and MySQL accessible to IBM i programs. Then at the COMMON show last week in Southern California, the Israeli software vendor launched two more products, including a change management system for the IBM i server and multi-LPAR support for its products. It also provided a glimpse into a product to be released later, called iCommand.

Raz-Lee says its new Change Tracker software automatically traces software modifications to IBM i programs at both the source and object levels.

Whether working from ground zero or building on existing investments, BCD‘s application development products have long been used by IBM midrange shops. One of the reasons is BCD’s continual investment in developing its product lineup, which handles everything from quick green-screen Web-enablement to multi-platform Web development. And for companies unfamiliar with BCD, here’s a surprise–the company has a newly enhanced business intelligence tool as well.

Most IBM i shops are talking about application modernization projects. And each year there are more of these projects deployed. The majority are quick and simple transformations of green-screen apps to Web apps. And

IBM i shops that use DRV Technologies‘ FlexTools software to manage their spool files now have the option to use the new DataFlex component to generate reports from their data. The new report writer, which was unveiled as part of FlexTools version 5 at last week’s COMMON conference in Anaheim, California, creates reports from DB2/400 files and outputs them in several formats.

DataFlex offers IBM i shops another way to query their DB2/400 data and generate basic reports from that data. The product enables users to join multiple database files, select data by record range, and specify field selection,

Zend Technologies last week announced that it has selected Percona to maintain and support DBi, the new version of the MySQL database developed for the IBM i platform. Percona is a well-respected provider of MySQL support services that competes directly with MySQL.

Zend developed DBi to be a drop-in replacement for MySQL on the IBM i platform. The creation of a MySQL variant was necessary because Oracle dropped IBM i support on MySQL in late 2010. DBi was first revealed by Zend in September 2011 and shipped last month.

It was initially expected that Zend developers would continue to

10ZiG Technologies had its latest product, the Zignature Pad, on display in the Expo hall of last week’s COMMON conference in Anaheim, California. The 12-inch tall pad is a dedicated signature collection device, and has features you won’t find with signature capture apps for an iPad.

There are several aspects of the Zignature Pad that make it a superior signature capture solution in highly regulated industries, such as healthcare, finance, and real estate, 10ZiG Tech president Martin Pladgeman told IT Jungle at last week’s COMMON.

For starters, the large color screen (12-inch by 7.5-inch) enables an entire document to be

VAI recently announced the signing of three distributors in the Northeast to license contracts for its ERP software, called S2K Enterprise. The companies–J. Polep Distribution Services, Hillcrest Foods, and Reiss Wholesale Hardware–are midsize businesses right in VAI’s industry sweet spot.

J. Polep Distribution Services is a Massachusetts-based distributor to convenience stores in New England. The 110-year-old company serves more than 4,000 chain and independent convenience stores from four distribution centers in Massachusetts, Rhode Island, and Connecticut.

The company selected VAI’s IBM i-based package for food distributors and manufacturers, called S2K for Food Enterprise Management, to drive its growth strategy, according

Symtrax recently launched Compleo Designer, a new tool designed to simplify the process of creating reusable document templates from the structured output of ERP systems, including JD Edwards and SAP.

Compleo Designer was created to help users adapt to the continually changing business requirements surrounding their documents. The software allows users to quickly generate new electronic document templates from the output of ERP systems, and to modify them to meet their organization’s needs. These templates then are used to generate the finished documents, until the output from the underlying ERP system changes again, and the process repeats.

The document