If you are an RPG programmer with more than a gallon left in your tank and the idea in your head you’ll be working for the foreseeable future, taking your development skills from green screen to GUI is advisable. Modern RPG skills are not all about a pretty presentation–plenty of architecting is left to be done–but a modern design tool gets you where you need to go. That’s why the latest design tool from looksoftware deserves your attention.

Looksoftware calls its core development IDE newlook, and this is version 10. It’s been four years since look released version 9, which

As organizations ramp up their mobile development programs, they’re faced with decisions. Should they choose Apple or Android? Native, hybrid, or browser-based? Tablet or smartphone? Once an organization chooses a direction, it risks potentially locking themselves in to that approach. With its history in 4GL development techniques, Magic Software realizes that flexibility is a feature in its own right.

You may remember Magic and its eDeveloper product, a 4GL development environment that supported the capability to generate RPG code that deployed on AS/400 servers. eDeveloper is no longer actively developed, but its heritage lives on in newer products, namely xpa

Organizations that want to use their IBM i server to deliver e-commerce capabilities to mobile devices may want to check out Commerce Edition Mobile (CE Mobile), a new application that is available now from LANSA. The solution, which LANSA originally announced at the COMMON conference earlier this year, promises to make quick work of the process of exposing product data housed in ERP systems to employees, partners, and customers via iOS and Android devices.

CE Mobile is an RPG application that delivers pre-built functionality for organizations that desire a mobile ecommerce or sales environment that’s closely tied into their

The era of big, expensive change management systems (CMSes) has come to a close, opening the door for smaller, easier-to-use CMSes such as the MDCMS product from the Swiss company Midrange Dynamics to capture market share. The company hopes to build more momentum in the North American IBM i market with a new version 7.1 release, which brings features like full support for JD Edwards World and a new migration utility to help customers move away from competing CMSes.

MDCMS is designed to be an easy-to-use change management system that helps developers with various lifecycle management tasks, including source code

IBM last week took the wraps off HATS 9.0, the latest incarnation of its Host Access Transformation Services product that delivers Web-based GUIs and Web services connections on-the-fly from 5250 and 3270 data streams. The new version of HATS, which is now available as a free download, brings the tool up to date with the latest Rational version 9 releases of the development tools that IBM shipped this summer, but not much else.

HATS is a rules-based screen transformation engine that turns 5250 and 3270 screens into graphical Web clients, Java- or Lotus-based rich clients, or into Web services for

Most customers implementing the VAULT400 online backup solution from United Computer Group choose the standard save-set option, which delivers a broad collection of incremental backups of IBM i data. But when the construction firm Hensel Phelps implemented VAULT400, it had something else in mind.

According to UCG, most VAULT400 customers choose the standard 24 save-set option, which gives customers 24 different save-sets of their IBM i data, including one each for the past five days, for the past four weeks, for the past 12 months, and for the past three years. Add the number of saves up, and it equals

ERP implementation specialist GSI last week announced the acquisition of the JD Edwards consulting business from Andrews Group. The resulting organization has experts with a collective 750 years of JD Edwards experience, GSI says.

GSI, which was founded in 2004 in the suburbs of Atlanta, Georgia, already had a considerable amount of JD Edwards consulting experience before buying Andrews Consulting, the JD Edwards consulting arm of Cheshire, Connecticut-based Andrews Group, which today is doing business under the name RapidDecision.

In fact, in the small world of JD Edwards consulting, the two companies had done quite bit of business

Dutch change management software provider Remain Software last week announced that it has entered into a partnership with Globus Labs that will see the Indian IT services company selling Remain’s TD/OMS, an application lifecycle management (ALM) solution that works with IBM i, Windows, Unix, and Linux platforms.

Remain originally developed TD/OMS in the early 1990s to provide change management capabilities for the IBM AS/400. In addition to providing a structure to support development and deployment of RPG and COBOL programs, TD/OMS has demonstrated a particular affinity for supporting the platform’s popular 4GLs environments, including LANSA‘s RDML, CA‘s 2E

IBM last month announced QRadar Vulnerability Manager (QVM), a new tool designed to give time-crunched administrators a simple and easy way to identify the most dangerous security vulnerabilities that exist in their IT systems.

QVM is like a security triage system for overworked administrators. The software automatically collects data from multiple network, endpoint, database, and application scanners; correlates it with actual use information from the QRadar SIEM (security information and event management); identifies the vulnerabilities that pose the highest threat of actually being exploited; and presents all this information in an easy-to-read dashboard interface.

Speed is the big advantage of

Original Software, a developer of software test utilities for IBM i and other platforms, last week announced the introduction of a new technology that it says will help reduce the amount of time required for an ERP upgrade by 30 percent.

Original calls the new technology Animation, and it does exactly that. It creates animated recordings of a user performing a task in an ERP system. Recording the execution of business processes is useful in the context of ERP upgrades because it allows anybody with a PC to understand the exact functionality at issue.

This animated approach also streamlines