• The Impact On IBM i Of Big Blue’s Acquisition Of Red Hat

  October 31, 2018 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Well, we can honestly say that we did not see that coming when IBM and Red Hat announced late last Sunday afternoon that Big Blue would be shelling out $34 billion to acquire the world’s most successful business that peddles support for open source infrastructure software.

  Ironically, at the time I happened to be writing about how IBM and Red Hat had just announced that they had brought the OpenShift Container Platform, a mashup of Docker and Kubernetes, to Power Systems machines running Linux, and I was lamenting that it was not trivial to figure out how to integrate …

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• Mono Port To IBM i Now Available

  October 31, 2018 Alex Woodie

  IBM i shops that want to run Microsoft .NET can now do so through the Mono middleware, which was officially ported to IBM i and AIX earlier this year by the Mono community. While the port is not feature complete, Mono can now run on IBM i 7.1 and higher via the PASE AIX runtime. It’s not a native port, but it’s better than nothing.

  Mono is an open source implementation of Microsoft’s .NET Framework, including a C# compiler and the Common Language Runtime (CLR), that allow .NET applications to run on non-Windows platforms, including Linux, MacOS, BSD, various flavors …

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• Serving Up Fast, Fresche Interfaces for IBM i

  October 31, 2018 Alex Woodie

  “Time is money,” as Benjamin Franklin once said. With enough of either, IBM i shops could accomplish all of their modernization goals. But of course, both time and money are limited, which is why tactical tools like the Presto modernization tool from Fresche are gaining traction.

  Fresche’s Presto is an IBM i modernization tool that takes 5250 output from applications and converts it on the fly into HTML that can be rendered in a standard Web browser. The software can also work with the RPG Open Access handler from IBM to power GUIs that have RPG-based back ends but …

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• Four Hundred Monitor, October 31

  October 31, 2018 Jenny Thomas

  Double, double, toil and trouble… if we had the predictive powers of the three witches from Macbeth, we might have seen the big move by IBM to acquire Red Hat coming. Fortunately we have Monitor to round up the top stories of the week and keep you in the loop in case your crystal ball is on the fritz. Although we have a bone to pick with whomever decided that Halloween should fall on a work day, to stay in the spirit on the job today, check out the link below for a preview of IBM’s upcoming movie featuring aliens …

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• What Is Happening With RFEs For IBM i?

  October 29, 2018 Alex Woodie

  IBM customers have been encouraged to vote on product enhancements for over a year as part of the Request for Enhancement (RFE) process, and a number of new features have actually made it into IBM i technology refreshes (TRs). What new or improved IBM i functionality will Big Blue work on next?

  It’s hard to say exactly which RFE items will strike a chord with IBM product managers, since the requests can be all over the board and impact a range of components, from the IBM i OS itself and the Db2 for i database to Access Client Solutions (ACS) …

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• Break Out Of Your RPG Comfort Zone

  October 29, 2018 Amanda Blackburn

  (Sponsored Content) IBM i developers, like all developers, can get stuck in a rut sometimes. The well-worn path that RPG provides is familiar and reassuring, but it doesn’t necessarily lead your company where it needs to go. That’s why exploring newer IBM i language alternatives, like Node.js, can provide a fresh path towards the goal of business innovation.

  The rapid ascent of the Node.js programming language over the past five years has been well-documented. While Java remains a popular business language, Node.js is now the world’s most popular development framework in all of computing, according to the 2018 …

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• Guru: Using SQL With Multi-Membered Files

  October 29, 2018 Mike Larsen

  Recently I worked on a process that required me to update records in a file based on certain criteria. Sounds like a common request, right? Well, there was a twist. The file had multiple members and the update needed to consider all of them. Suddenly, a “simple” request became a bit more challenging.

  I knew of a few ways to work with multi-membered files, but I like to lay out all the options before deciding on a game plan. One method I considered was to perform an override of the file (OVRDBF command). That would certainly work, although I have …

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• Kubernetes Container Control Comes To Power Systems

  October 29, 2018 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  The moment that Google created a clone of parts of its internal Borg cluster and container management system and open sourced it as the Kubernetes project, the jig was pretty much up.

  Google had done a lot of the fundamental work to bring containers to the Linux platform starting way back in 2005, and had shared its techniques with the open source community, leading directly to the Docker container format and the engine that runs it atop the Linux kernel. While Docker, the company, got a jump start with its Docker Swarm container orchestrator and then its fuller Docker Enterprise …

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• It’s Your Last Chance To Take The IBM i Marketplace Survey

  October 29, 2018 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  We are coming down to the final stretch and we need you to take a few minutes and participate in the IBM i Marketplace Survey that has been done for the past several years by HelpSystems. The survey takes the pulse of the IBM i community and gives us some insight into what you all are up to.

  The community has to express its needs if it ever hopes to steer IBM’s behavior, and Big Blue is more open about this process than many IT suppliers even if it might not feel like it sometimes. So this is your chance …

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• PASE Versus ILE: Which Is Best For Open Source?

  October 22, 2018 Alex Woodie

  Open source has emerged as a driver of innovation in the past 20 years, and has greatly accelerated technological innovation. The proprietary IBM i platform has also benefited from this trend, thanks in large part to the capability to run Linux applications in the PASE runtime. But some members of the IBM i community are concerned that the fruits of the open source innovation have not tasted quite as sweet as they do on other platforms.

  Linux was the original breakout star in open source software, and so it should be no surprise that the vast majority of software developed …

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