• Ansible Automation Story Gets Better on IBM i

  March 8, 2021 Alex Woodie

  When IBM and Red Hat launched support for IBM i with its Ansible automation software in July 2020, it provided about three dozen Ansible modules that supported specific actions on IBM i. The companies recently added another dozen or so Ansible updates for IBM i, making the software even more useful on the midrange server.

  Ansible is an open source configuration management package originally designed to enable remote administration of Linux servers. Over time, the software has been adopted to support a wide number of operating environments, including Kubernetes orchestration environments managing Docker containers in public and private clouds.

  The …

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• Why Open Source Is Critical for Digital Transformation

  March 3, 2021 Alex Woodie

  In 2019, digital transformation seemed like the latest buzzword to come out of the hype-heavy technology business. But in 2020, as the COVID-19 pandemic upturned life as we know it, the idea took on new importance. For IBM i shops looking to stay alive in competitive markets, digital transformation is now a requirement. And according to IBM’s Jesse Gorzinski, the digital transformation path runs squarely through open source.

  2020 was a bizarre year in many ways. But there’s no doubt that it was a watershed year for open source on IBM i, with the delivery of a number of significant …

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• mrc Refreshes IBM i Low-Code Dev Tool

  March 3, 2021 Alex Woodie

  IBM i shops that use the latest release of mrc’s m-Power Web app development tool will find the tool easier to use and that applications can be developed faster than before, the company says.

  mrc markets m-Power as a low-code development platform that supports IBM i and other Java platforms. The software is not a full-blown integrated development environment (IDE), the Chicago-based vendor says. But if the user is looking to quickly generate Web interfaces, dashboards, reports, portals, or mobile apps for existing IBM i applications, then it is a good fit.

  The vendor says it built the new release …

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• Unit Testing Automation Hits Shift Left Instead of Ctrl-Alt-Delete Cash

  March 3, 2021 Nick Blamey

  In this time of the coronavirus pandemic, with its dual pressures of the uncertainty of the economy at a small and global scale and the fever pitch need to rapidly modernize applications, it is hard to know where to start. Given this scale of change, as a supplier of application modernization tools that are derived from both a strong IBM i heritage and the youth and strength of open source, you might think that ARCAD Software would be most interested in selling customers its entire toolbox.

  Not necessarily – the answer all depends on your starting point. There is an …

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• Four Hundred Monitor, March 3

  March 3, 2021 Jenny Thomas

  IBM’s attention on the hybrid cloud is common knowledge by now. IBM CEO Arvind Krishna has been crystal clear that he is deeply passionate about the hybrid cloud, and some weeks the hybrid cloud dominates the news cycle. Like this week. Our IBM i Chief Architect Steve Will kicked it off with his latest blog post to clear up some of the confusion he says surrounds industry cloud strategies, which you can find as our Top Story below. Then read on for the latest on the hybrid cloud, as well as the latest IBM i resources and events.

  Top Stories

  …

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• IBM i PTF Guide, Volume 23, Number 9

  March 3, 2021 Doug Bidwell

  Hello, good people of the IBM i Land. As so many newscasters all said across the United States earlier this week, it is hard to believe that it is March already. But it is March indeed, and it has been about a year since the coronavirus went pandemic. We hope you are well, and we hope you stay that way.

  In this week’s edition of the IBM i PTF Guide, you will see that Rational Developer for i now supports an updated Java – to be specific, Java 8 SR 6 FP 15. You can find out more at …

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• Doing The Texas Two Step From Power9 To Power10

  March 1, 2021 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  You won’t find an official IBM customer announcement letter on this deal, but we caught wind of it back in late January and we have confirmed with Big Blue that it is indeed offering customers a two-step upgrade track from Power8 and earlier iron to Power10 iron with a middle step on a Power9 machine until the Power10 machines are available starting later this year and into early next year.

  As we reported back on February 1, IBM has indeed been working on something called the “Two-Step Upgrade Program” for customers, which had a name change shift to “IBM Power …

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• PHP’s Legacy Problem

  March 1, 2021 Alex Woodie

  PHP is one of the most popular languages on the Web, with arguably billions of lines of code in use across hundreds of thousands of applications. But that long history of successful use exposes a problem for PHP that IBM i shops will be all-too familiar with: a severe reluctance to upgrade. A recent survey by Perforce puts PHP’s legacy situation in perspective.

  In January, Perforce (which owns Zend) published its 2021 PHP Landscape Report, which is based on a survey of 670 developers and administrators that Perforce conducted last fall. That was just before the delivery of PHP …

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• Guru: For IBM i Newcomers, An Access Client Solutions Primer

  March 1, 2021 Rob McNelly

  I enjoy reading about IBM i Fresh Faces. Sure, it’s refreshing to see that it’s not just graybeards like me who are working on the platform, but what really matters is that young people are learning about, getting hands-on with, and coming to love IBM i. I appreciate that many of these stories revolve around system/application modernization and open source solutions. This gives newcomers to IBM i a degree of comfort by reducing their learning curve.

  Learning any new technology is challenging. Specifically, how do you go from learning about the concepts to actually getting on a machine and …

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• IBM i 7.1 Extended Out To 2024 And Up To The IBM Cloud

  March 1, 2021 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  In case you have not figured it out, Big Blue has finally figured out that IBM i 7.1 is a wall that a lot of customers can’t get over. Which is something we have been saying for a long time. And to IBM’s credit, it is doing something about it. A bunch of things, as it turns out, and as part of the February 23 announcements last week, IBM did a few more things that will increase the long-term viability of this release.

  IBM i 7.1 went off regular support back on April 30, 2018, which was almost three years …

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