It’s always interesting to see what the wizards at LANSA cook up with new versions of their fourth generation language (4GL) integrated development environment (IDE), because it provides a glimpse into what kinds of programming techniques are hot, and where the pain points lie with current development architectures. LANSA 2005, which the vendor officially unveiled at the COMMON conference in its hometown of Chicago this week, does not disappoint in this respect.

LANSA has always billed its IDE as an insurance policy against technology change, and in fact, this is largely a feature of all 4GLs. Since business logic written

Life is good for Jim Sloan these days. The retired IBMer is able to work when he wants, on whatever he wants, and he’s able to get away from Rochester, Minnesota, and spend time in warmer climes, like Aruba, where he recently vacationed. He also enjoys continued success with his business and product, TAA Tools, an ever-growing collection of OS/400 utilities that has helped thousands of OS/400 shops, and which now boasts more commands than OS/400 itself.

The history of TAA Productivity Tools holds a unique piece of AS/400 and COMMON lore. During the early days of the

Trucking companies looking to implement Qualcomm‘s wireless trailer-tracking system can let Qualcomm do the heavy lifting through a new hosting solution it announced last week. Since the new T2 Untethered TrailerTRACS system became generally available last fall, customers have been able to integrate it with their OS/400-based dispatch systems. Now Qualcomm is offering to run it on its own iSeries servers, and provide access to it over the Web.

While Qualcomm is best known for the chips and technology it develops for cellular phones, it’s also been a major player in the market for software for the trucking industry

OS/400 shops should be able to easily integrate host access products from NetManage into their sign-on (SSO) environment as a result of the newly added support for Kerberos authentication that NetManage announced last week. In addition to simplifying user log-ons with SSO, RUMBA 7.4 and OnWeb 7.2 both bring additional security enhancements, including new Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) and Secure Shell (SSH) features.

The price of forgotten passwords continues to add costs to corporate operations and suck profits from the bottom line. According to research firm Gartner, 25 to 40 percent of all calls to the help desk are