• IBM i Knowledge Sharing: RSE Keyboard Shortcuts

  October 7, 2015 Dan Burger

  A thing of beauty is a joy to behold. For programmers, that thing of beauty is called a shortcut. The more you have, the greater the joy. Most RPG programmers know some shortcuts. Some are hoarded, but more often they get passed around with an “it’s better to give than receive” attitude. Call it karma, if you will. If you can go along with that, let me introduce you to the Queen of Karma–Susan Gantner. Gantner is famous in the IBM i community for coming up with programming shortcuts. They’re tacked to cubical walls, taped to computer monitors, laminated to

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• Six Signs Of The Long, Slow Decline Of ERP

  September 28, 2015 Alex Woodie

  For the past 20 years, the class of applications known as enterprise resource planning (ERP) has largely dominated the business software discussion. But that hegemony is now slipping due to a variety of factors, leading some to speculate that ERP’s heyday is in the past. The big question then becomes: What should companies do next? If you work at a company of appreciable size (say $50 million in sales or more), chances are good you rely on an ERP system that doesn’t just plan (as the name suggests) but actually executes the business processes that make your business tick. Whether

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• Bootstrap Responsive To IBM i Mobile Development

  September 28, 2015 Dan Burger

  Do you know a good mobile application when you see one? I’ll bet you do. Although the IBM midrange community lives in a predominately green-screen world and uses outdated terminology like AS/400, iSeries, and System i, we see what’s going on around us. It doesn’t matter if you are an application developer, an app dev manager, or the worried owner of a company with concerns about the current state of the business applications. It’s not difficult to compare what you have application-wise with what is becoming the norm: Web applications that look better and work better on both desktop and

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• Can OpenPower Take A Bite Out Of The Datacenter?

  September 28, 2015 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  It is not often that I give readers of The Four Hundred reading assignments outside of this publication, but from time to time, in the course of the other work I do in other parts of the IT industry, I run across things that are relevant to adjacent markets that ultimately have some bearing on the Power Systems-IBM i platform. Such is the case with a presentation that the chief for IBM‘s Systems Group gave to Wall Street recently. Tom Rosamilia, who has been general manager of the System z and Power Systems division in his long career at

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• As I See It: America Needs A Vacation

  September 28, 2015 Victor Rozek

  Entrepreneurs are typically blessed with some combination of courage, imagination, and somebody else’s cash. But while these advantages occasionally translate to wild success in the marketplace, that success comes at a price. As reported by Business Insider, Dr. Michael Freeman, a clinical professor at UCSF, surveyed entrepreneurs and found that just under half admitted dealing with mental health issues, and 30 percent report suffering from depression (over four times the national norm), 29 percent struggle with ADHD, and 27 percent live with anxiety. Changing the world is stressful work. Sounds like they need a vacation. They’re not the only

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• IBM i, RPG, And Inaccurate Assumptions

  September 28, 2015 Dan Burger

  Anyone who says RPG is a dead-end career is dead wrong. It’s the door to opportunity. People are walking through that door with an education that costs less than $1,000 and a time investment of about six months. They have a certificate in hand and more than half of them have an entry-level RPG programmer job at an IBM midrange shop. Some would say this is the beginning of the end, but is an old-fashioned Midwestern success story. “Most of the students are hard-working adults who are feeding a family and have committed to making a career change,” says Gregory

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• Unifying Mobile and Web Development on IBM i

  September 23, 2015 Alex Woodie

  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

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• Stimulus Grants Are An IBM i Community Service

  September 23, 2015 Dan Burger

  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

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• IBM Tops List of Security Vulnerabilities, But What Does It Mean?

  September 23, 2015 Alex Woodie

  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

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• CNX Looks Beyond RPG with Web Framework

  September 23, 2015 Alex Woodie

  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. Up to

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