TFH Volume: 30 Issue: 78 Archives

To 2032 . . . And Beyond!

December 7, 2020 Timothy Prickett Morgan

As you sit here in 2020, can you even imagine 2032? Can you imagine beyond that? Oddly enough, I can imagine three or four decades out from here a lot more easily than I can do a dozen years, even though I know the error bars get longer and the probabilistic clouds get fuzzier the further into the future you wander with your mind. So what does it mean, really, when Big Blue commits to support the IBM i platform at least until 2032, a mere dozen years away in a platform that, depending on how you want to …
Read more
Thoroughly Modern: What’s New With PHP On IBM i?

December 7, 2020 Timothy Prickett Morgan

If you use PHP on IBM i, you’ve likely seen some recent announcements about some great changes coming to the open-source language. According to the latest blog post from Zend on PHP 8, there are a number of new functions being introduced including str_contains, str_starts_with, and str_ends_with, preg_last_error_msg and get_debug_type. In addition, the core PHP 8 engine has many new features, optimizations and improvements in the type system, error handling, and consistency. The key areas include:
- JIT Compiler
- Fatal errors on incompatible method signatures
- LSP Enforcement
- Resource “Classes”
- Assertion behavior
- XML-RPC is now in PECL
- Reflection changes
This is …
Read more
Guru: Fall Brings New RPG Features

December 7, 2020 Jon Paris

In this time of pandemic we could all do with a little cheering up. So “Santa” Barbara (a.k.a. Barbara Morris) and the elves at the IBM Toronto Lab have delivered an early Christmas present. Available now via PTF for 7.3 and 7.4, there are some real gems in these latest RPG enhancements.

For the most part, these enhancements assist in improving code readability. That is to say that they are not giving us completely new functionality in the way that (say) Open Access or DATA-INTO did. Rather they give us better, clearer ways of doing things. They have an additional …
Read more
As I See It: Disruption Revisited

December 7, 2020 Victor Rozek

This time of the year, I generally write a predictive piece about IT trends and outside influences likely to impact the profession in the coming year. Three years ago I wrote an article titled As I See It: Disruption. In it, I posited that IT would have to contend with three main sources of disruption: major weather events, the impending demise of net neutrality, and widespread security breaches from what has become an international hacking industry.

I was right on two of three counts. Net neutrality is still limping along. But perhaps I was more prescient than I thought: …
Read more
MariaDB Now Available Via RPM

December 7, 2020 Alex Woodie

When it comes to databases for the IBM i community, Db2 for i is, and always be, number one. But there’s no reason to limit yourself to just one database, and now IBM is making it easier for IBM i shops to get their hands on MariaDB, which could be the number two database on the platform.

MariaDB is an open source relational database that is a fork of MySQL. MySQL, of course, has been supported on the IBM i server for many years. But following Oracle’s acquisition of Sun Microsystems, which had acquired the company that developed MySQL, …
Read more

To 2032 . . . And Beyond!

Thoroughly Modern: What’s New With PHP On IBM i?

Guru: Fall Brings New RPG Features

As I See It: Disruption Revisited

MariaDB Now Available Via RPM

Content archive

Recent Posts

Subscribe

Pages

Search