“Free” is not typically a word that’s associated with IBM, especially when it comes to System i and System z programming tools, which can carry seven- or eight-figure price tags for the biggest customers. But Big Blue is making a big gamble that a free version of its EGL tool for creating Web 2.0 applications, tentatively named EGL Community Edition, will pay off in the long run by establishing a large community of users who are familiar with EGL, and provide an alternative to PHP and Ruby on Rails.

IBM announced plans to deliver a free, unsupported version of

Infor yesterday unveiled a new program that seeks to make it easier and less expensive for customers to upgrade to the latest release of their software, or to migrate to the latest release of an equivalent Infor product. The program, called Infor Flex, is aimed at addressing a problem faced by Infor, along with its big ERP competitors: The fact that many customers are running on very old releases of software, and have no easy way to get current without incurring lots of risk and big fees. Flex addresses those pain points, Infor says.

Infor succeeded in becoming one of

Before the recession, organizations looked to cut costs by extending equipment upgrade cycles and trimming staff. Globalization increased competitiveness and then the recession intensified the requirements for success. In IBM AS/400 (iSeries and System i) IT departments, this plays out in decisions to delay system upgrades and make staff reductions, just like other departments are faced with similar situations. Given this reality, Steve Kilner at vLegaci, believes he has a tool that fits in well.

Kilner, who is president of vLegaci, has a product called Codelyzer. Its introduction was covered in Four Hundred Stuff in an article titled “Codelyzer

The benefits of Web-based applications for purposes such as online shopping and order entry can reduce personnel costs and other bottlenecks when working with suppliers and customers. In IBM i shops, the interest in PHP has been surprisingly vigorous. Two companies that recently went live with IBM i PHP applications are Midwest Fuel Injection (MWFI) and American Foods Groups (AFG), both of which chose WebSmart PHP from Business Computer Design.

Interestingly, the technicians responsible for PHP development at each company have very different programming backgrounds. MWFI’s Tony Kudrys has lots of Web experience but only basic IBM i knowledge,

Advanced Systems Concepts (ASCI) last week announced that it has added support for four operating systems with its cross-platform job scheduling software, called ActiveBatch Job Scheduling and Workload Automation, including IBM i, Hewlett-Packard‘s NonStop Kernel, SuSE Linux, and SCO Group‘s SCO Unix operating environments.

Advanced Systems Concepts is a software development company based in Morristown, New Jersey. It’s not to be confused with the Chicago, Illinois-based Advanced Systems Concepts that Help/Systems bought in October 2006. The company says its customers have installed its products 200,000 times in 36 countries around the world, including about 1,300 installations for ActiveBatch.

Kisco Information Systems last week unveiled an update to SNDTWEET, its novel utility that turns the social networking tool into a communication and system management tool for the System i. Now, with version 1.03, Kisco is enabling customers to reply back to the System i using Twitter, instead of just enabling the System i to send “tweets” through the service.

In just a week and a half, thanks to a contentious election in Iran and the crackdown on mainstream media that has followed, Twitter has gone from being the poster child for everything that’s wrong with the social networking movement

Magic Software yesterday launched uniPaaS version 1.8, a new edition of its framework for developing and running rich Internet applications that live in the cloud, in the customer’s data center, or a combination of the two. With this release, the Irvine, California, software company is offering new integration points with Microsoft .NET, which Magic says will enrich the user experience, particularly for Windows Mobile apps.

First unveiled in early 2008 as G5, uniPaaS is Magic’s new flagship platform for rich Internet applications and the software as a service (SaaS) delivery mechanism. It borrows heavily from the rapid application development expertise

System i shops that rely on Bytware‘s StandGuard Anti-Virus software to protect their i OS and Domino environments from becoming infested with Windows viruses and other pieces of malicious code will be happy to hear that the software vendor now supports Domino 8.5, which was released by IBM last month.

For the last six years, Bytware has been developing and selling StandGuard Anti-Virus for the IBM i (OS/400) platform. While the Power Systems (eServer iSeries) platform is generally regarded to be highly resistant to security threats that commonly afflict the Windows operating system, the i OS server can be

Companies that use Cleo Communications‘ VersaLex software to drive B2B transactions among System i, Unix, Windows, and Linux servers will gain new automation capabilities with version 4.1 of the product, which was announced last week.

VersaLex is the core Java-based communications engine that’s behind several products used to send and receive EDI documents over the Internet using standards such as AS2, AS3, ebXML, HTTP/S, FTP/S, and WebSphere MQ. Other products that use this core engine (and are members of Cleo’s VersaLex Suite) include VersaLex Trader (VLTrader), a managed file transfer solution; LexiCom a secure file transfer agent; VersaLex Proxy

IBM‘s Rational products are happier with their integrated development environments (IDEs) than customers of other development toolmakers, including Microsoft, Sun Microsystems, Oracle, and a handful of other vendors, according to a new report from Evans Data. It was the second straight victory in the annual survey for IBM’s Rational tools, and the third in four years.

For the last four years, Evans Data has surveyed scores of developers across the land to get an idea of what they’re working on, what tools they like, and what they don’t like. Evans Data used to call this