It’s hard for businesses to justify the expense of supporting multiple development teams, each with a set of specialized skills. IBM i shops know this better than most, since RPG isn’t used on other platforms. But when it comes to developing Web and mobile apps, the technology and the frameworks are in place to consolidate these previously disparate functions–in IBM i shops and everywhere else.

The rapid maturation of smartphones and tablets has captivated the attention of enterprise software developers, who are finding ever more creative ways to benefit from putting corporate data and core business processes into the hands

The collaboration between the Maxava iFoundation and the IBM i community is expanding and showing some impressive results. The most recent round of grant funding benefited 34 organizations, according to according to information we received from Maxava, the disaster recovery and high availability vendor.

Now in its fifth year, the Maxava iFoundation offers grants to organizations focused on developing the IBM i community by promoting skills enhancement and the recruiting of business professionals to work with the IBM midrange platform. Each year, the grant awards have totaled in the neighborhood of $50,000. The majority of that amount winds up

IBM has found itself atop many prestigious lists over the years–the holder of the most patents, the greenest company in IT, and the biggest server maker. But this month the cybersecurity research firm Secunia put IBM at the top of one list that Big Blue won’t be proud of: The list of software vendors with the most security vulnerabilities. But what exactly that means is the subject of some controversy.

In its “Vulnerability Update” for the period for May through July, Secunia reported that IBM was the vendor with the most vulnerable products over the three-month period. It was the

CNX Corp. is putting the finishing touches on a new release of its Valence Web application development framework for IBM i. Among the compelling new features in version 4.2 is support for PHP, which will help its developers keep up with the rapidly changing times.

Valence is a development framework that’s used primarily to create new Web-based applications that run on the IBM i. When it shipped several years back, the software combined RPG service programs with a range of pre-built JavaScript components (it uses Sencha Ext JS) to enable the creation of modern Web and mobile applications.

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RPG Creeps Up Language Ranking

RPG has crept up in the TIOBE Index, a monthly ranking of the popularity of programming languages. Because RPG is still the primary language that’s used to develop applications on the IBM i platform, this is a good sign for IBM i job growth.

The TIOBE Index for August 2015 had RPG as the 42nd most popular ranking with a rating of 0.273 percent. It was in a virtual tie with Haskell and just ahead of (Visual) FoxPro. The TIOBE Index for September 2015 had RPG creeping up three spots to number 39 with