• Yes, AI Is Happening on IBM i, and It’s Happening Now

  October 20, 2021 Alex Woodie

  Artificial intelligence is often thought of as a futuristic technology that may have repercussions for IBM i, but only in the future. Maybe AI will be important to IBM i about the same time when we have flying cars and moving sidewalks. But as a recent POWERUp presentation by an IBM cloud and AI architect shows, AI is already happening on the IBM i server, and it’s happening today.

  Benoit Marolleau, who is the cloud and AI architect for the IBM Client Center Montpellier (France), made a compelling case for IBM i shops to start exploring how they can potentially …

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• Original and Midrange Dynamics in IBM i Test Tie-Up

  October 20, 2021 Alex Woodie

  In the fast-paced world of DevOps, it’s critical to test your applications in a timely fashion. The quicker you can spot bugs and other issues, the quicker you can fix them and get the new features into production. That’s the gist behind a new partnership recently unveiled by Original Software and Midrange Dynamics, two of the leading providers of DevOps and test automation tooling, respectively.

  On September 30, the two vendors announced they have entered into a partnership that will not only see them marketing to their respective customer bases, but also integrating their respective offerings to deliver, as they …

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• Expanding Fields Is A Bigger Pain In The Neck Than You Think

  October 20, 2021 Andrew Ireland

  Remember the Y2K problem, when companies had two-digit dates for years in their applications and the millennial turn was coming and they suddenly needed a four-digit date so all the math would work out right comparing the present, future, and past? Well, every time you need to change a field length in your source code – which almost always means making it bigger, not shorter – you have to suffer through a mini Y2K crisis.

  Yes, the Y2K crisis did not bring an end to civilization as we knew it, as some were prognosticating and maybe a few were hoping, …

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• Four Hundred Monitor, October 20

  October 20, 2021 Jenny Thomas

  We’re not out of the 2021 woods yet, but companies are already looking forward to the new year and how to best prepare for a return to business. According to a recent report from Gartner, AI and cloud will continue to be among the top IT priorities in 2022, all while dealing with the new reality of hybrid working that is here to stay. This week in Monitor, we catch up on some headlines from all around the computing world, and bring you some resources and events from our IBM i ecosystem that we hope you will find helpful.

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• IBM i PTF Guide, Volume 23, Number 42

  October 20, 2021 Doug Bidwell

  It’s a mixed bag for Program Temporary Fixes, or PTFs, for the supported releases of the IBM i operating system, with some tweaks here and there and some High Impact/Pervasive, or HIPER, patches coming out for IBM i 7.4 and IBM i 7.3.

  A relatively quiet week is a good thing about this time of the year, with the fall season underway and everyone gathering up strength to do push through the final two months of the year once Halloween gets here. (That is a line of demarcation, isn’t it?) We are not expecting a lot in the way of …

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• Planning A Modernization Project? Read This First

  October 18, 2021 Alex Woodie

  Modernization means a lot of things to a lot of people. If you happen to ask Chris Koppe, the senior vice president of strategy, transformation, and modernization services at Fresche Solutions, what modernization means to him, get ready to spend the next hour listening to his response.

  That’s the approximate length of Koppe’s recent presentation at the POWERUp conference, titled Developing Your Modernization Plan: What Are Your Options? and it’s worth every second. Koppe explored the topic in such breadth and depth that we though it was worth highlighting his main points. Of course, if you’re a COMMON member and …

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• The Ease Of API Programming Has To Be Balanced By Heightened API Security

  October 18, 2021 Brian May

  If you have modernized legacy applications or created new applications from scratch, you very likely have application programming interfaces, or APIs, exposed to enable applications to share data. To some ways of thinking, this sharing of data between chunks of code in a formalized way – within the organization or across code bases developed internally or created by third parties and residing on premises, in the cloud somewhere, or both – is what actually constitutes an application. The integrated whole is what makes everything work.

  By their very nature, therefore, APIs are a boon to companies looking to weave together …

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• Guru: What Is Constant Folding And Why Should I Care About It?

  October 18, 2021 Ted Holt

  Constant folding is a compiler-optimization technique, whereby the compiler replaces calculations that involve constants with the result values when possible. Constant folding is common in modern compilers, and according to the RPG reference, the RPG compiler uses this technique. (See the documentation of the %div and %rem functions, for example.)

  But you and I don’t write compilers. We write business applications. Why then should we care about constant folding? That’s a question worth pondering.

  Consider how I used to have to write RPG in the Dark Ages.

  C                     MOVE CUSTNR    CUSTSV  50
  

  Here I’m copying the customer account number to …

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• As I See It: The Management Challenge

  October 18, 2021 Victor Rozek

  Imagine coaching an athletic team under the following conditions: Some percentage of your players do not practice in your facility. You have minimal contact with them, and even less influence over how, when, and how long they practice. Building and maintaining team cohesion is almost impossible. There’s a chance some of your players may be unavailable at some point during the season, and your training facility could be closed for an unspecified period of time. Yet you are still expected to win.

  That’s roughly the situation in which managers find themselves. Some percentage of their employees probably still work from …

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• We Have The Whole World Of Cloud In Our Hands

  October 18, 2021 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Cloud is a consumption model more than anything else, but it is also an architecture. What that really means is that for a lot of customers, on premises cloud is a bit different from what are called “public” clouds, which we all know are as proprietary as any System/3X or AS/400 or IBM i on Power Systems ever was. There ain’t nothing at all public about it, and we are trying to break the habit of calling them that. The point is, the big clouds outside of your datacenter look like power utilities, with pricing based on both time and …

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