• Thoroughly Modern: Speed Up Application Development With Automated Testing

  October 12, 2020 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Starting with the System/38 and even more so with the AS/400 and its progeny, the hallmark of the system, at least according to IBM, was its ease of use. This is not exactly the right idea. While the integrated nature of the platform means it is easy to deploy, and the self-management nature of tech support, database administration, and even system administration yields an ease of management, and the tight coupling of the relational database management system with the high-level compilers has definitely yielded an ease of programming.

  It is that last bit that is the hallmark …

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• Guru: Dynamic Arrays Come To RPG – Limitations, Circumventions, And More

  October 12, 2020 Jon Paris

  In my first two tips in this series I covered the basics of automatic sizing arrays and variable sized arrays. In this final part am going to discuss some of the current limitations in this support and the facilities IBM has put in place to help circumvent them.

  IBM publishes an extensive list of the limitations, but in normal usage only a couple present “real” restrictions in practical terms. If you are curious though, you can find the full list here.

  Limitations

  The first limitation to bear in mind is that, currently, only top-level variables can be defined …

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• IBM Goes All-In On Hybrid Cloud

  October 12, 2020 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Well, that was a bit of a surprise, and probably something that only obliquely matters to IBM i shops at the moment, but Big Blue’s top brass has decided to carve out its managed infrastructure services business from Global Services and spin it out as a new, publicly traded company.

  This business, which is tentatively being called NewCo until a real name is provided, is expected to be cut loose in a tax free manner and distributed to IBM’s shareholders by the end of 2021, so we have some time to assess the ramifications, if any, for the IBM i …

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• Tweaks To Power System Iron Complement TR Updates

  October 12, 2020 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Back in July, IBM upgraded the peripheral I/O on several of its Power9-based servers with more PCI-Express 4.0 bandwidth capacity, and now IBM is offering the increased bandwidth on several machines tuned up for running SAP HANA in addition to making a number of other hardware enhancements and withdrawals.

  In announcement letter 120-054 you will get the feeds and speeds of the updated Power H922, a two-socket, 2U server, and in announcement letter 120-055 you will get the feeds and speeds of the updated Power H924, a two-socket, 4U system. As far as I can tell, the machines are essentially …

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• How The Latest TRs Bolster The Core IBM i OS

  October 7, 2020 Alex Woodie

  Yesterday was Technology Refresh (TR) day for IBM and its IBM i operating system, and Big Blue didn’t disappoint. The company unveiled new releases of IBM i 7.4 and 7.3 that bring a slew of new capabilities to the core operating system as well as surrounding offerings like Db2 Mirror, ACS, and RDi. In this article, we’ll look at enhancements to the core OS and related key features.

  During a COMMON webcast Tuesday, IBM i Chief Architect Steve Will touched broadly on a number of enhancements that soon will be available in the TRs. Most of the new capabilities will …

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• What’s the Deal? Battling the ‘L’ Word

  October 7, 2020 Alex Woodie

  It’s hard to read or write about the IBM i server or its big brother, the System z mainframe, without seeing the word “legacy” bandied about. These business systems have stood the test of time, providing value for millions of organizations, and the reward for that amazing longevity is to be called old and out of date. What’s the deal?

  We have searched for other terms to replace legacy, as if the word itself is the problem. Calling these “heritage” systems is one way people have tried to avoid the stigma associated with the “L” word (we’ve have even tried …

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• Taking The Pulse Of The IBM i Market

  October 7, 2020 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  If you want to know what is going on in an economy – what is really happening – you have to not talk to just the people in the state capitals or Washington D.C., but you have to talk to real business people who are out there every day, running businesses and trying to meet a payroll and provide that good or service that keeps the money rolling.

  This is why we like talking to business partners in the IBM i marketplace, because the use of the system cuts across industries and geographies and it gives a real sense how …

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• Four Hundred Monitor, October 7

  October 7, 2020 Jenny Thomas

  Fall is a special season. As we look forward to the holiday season, we can enjoy watching the leaves turn and the welcome return of cooler temperatures. And most important to our little ecosystem, fall brings us Technology Refreshes from IBM. Our readers were the first to get the news on Monday from our fearless and always in-the-know editor-in-chief Timothy Prickett Morgan. (Never fear if you missed it, you can find TPM’s story at the top of our Top Stories of the week listed below.) With any luck, fall will kick off a new trend and we will end this …

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• IBM i PTF Guide, Volume 22, Number 40

  October 7, 2020 Doug Bidwell

  Are you feeling vulnerable today? Well, even if you are not, your IBM i system is. There are two security bulletins that relate to Java that are affecting the IBM i platform. Specifically, there was a Security Bulletin: Multiple vulnerabilities in IBM Java SDK and IBM Java Runtime affect IBM i, which you can see here and Security Bulletin: IBM Java SDK and IBM Java Runtime for IBM i is affected by CVE-2020-2590, which you can see there.

  The IBM i Group PTF numbers containing the fix for these CVEs are the latest Java Group PTFs in the IBM …

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• The Fall Technology Refreshes Are Almost Here

  October 5, 2020 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  There has been a spring-fall rhythm to the cadence of software updates for along time, but the creation of the OpenStack cloud controller by NASA and Rackspace Hosting really snapped the commercial Linux distros into an April and October cycle of commercial rollups. And so, after many years of Technology Refreshes that follow the same rhythm, we come to expect updates to IBM i about now.

  And starting tomorrow, IBM will be rolling out the fall Technology Refreshes for the current releases. That would be IBM i 7.3 TR9 and IBM i 7.4 TR3. And these, unlike those partial Technology …

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