• Java Finally Open Sourced Completely–Almost

  May 14, 2007 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Sun Microsystems hosted its annual JavaOne conference last week, and the top software brass at the company, who are on a tear to open source all of the software developed by Sun to catch the open source wave and, presumably, to blow by proprietary software architectures, got most of the final bits of the Java platform out as open source software at the event. As Sun said it would last November, Java has been open sourced under the GNU GPL v2 license, which is not the v3 license that the Free Software Foundation‘s founder, Richard Stallman, is trying

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• Vision Solutions Extends Service Certification, Joins ISV Advantage Initiative

  May 14, 2007 Dan Burger

  Buyers of enterprise software make some difficult choices based on product comparisons. A lot is riding on the product purchased today and the future development of that product. The same can be said about the service side of a purchasing decision. Product assurances generally are easier to test and verify than promises of service. As you may or may not know, technology companies can obtain certification for the service they provide. It requires auditing and it quantifies the effectiveness of customer service and support based on performance standards and industry best practices. For the third consecutive year, Vision Solutions has

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• TomorrowNow Says Biz is Booming, Opens Mexico Office

  May 14, 2007 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  While it may be at the center of a lawsuit between database and ERP software supplier Oracle and its own parent company, SAP, over the alleged theft of proprietary information concerning the support of Oracle’s ERP suites, TomorrowNow says that the business of providing third-party support for Oracle’s software is booming. Specifically, TomorrowNow, which provides support for J.D. Edwards, Siebel, PeopleSoft applications from Oracle and Baan applications from Infor, said that business has doubled in the first quarter of 2007. While the company did not provide precise revenue figures, it did say that it signed 76 new deals

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• You Know You Have Been in the AS/400 Market Too Long When

  May 14, 2007 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  We all get too much email these days, and as the editor in chief of an online publishing company whose email was plastered all over the Universe–well, Google’s cache, anyway–I get so much spam that my filter can’t handle it all. A lot of it still gets through. I knew I was in the i5/OS and OS/400 market too long when I saw the following email title. . . . Say ‘YES’ to perfect s3x! . . . and I immediately thought, “Who is trying to sell me an AS/400?” Seriously.                      Post this story to del.icio.us                Post this story

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• WHERE Versus HAVING

  May 9, 2007 Hey, Ted

  What is the purpose of SQL’s HAVING operator? It seems to me to be unnecessary, since the WHERE operator can choose which records are to be included in the query. What am I missing? –Rich Don’t sweat it, Rich. This is a very common point of confusion. Let me try to straighten it out for you, and in the process I’ll add a tip that some of the more experienced readers may not have seen before. Sometimes you can get the same result either WHERE or HAVING. The following two SQL commands produce the same result set. That is, both

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• Error-Checking Email Addresses, for Intelligent People

  May 9, 2007 Ted Holt

  Note: The code accompanying this article is available for download here.   Dear Intelligent Colleague: I’ve been less than impressed with the results of keying invalid email addresses into database files, mainly because I’ve had to deal with some of that undeliverable email. I recently wrote a little RPG routine that checks for glaring errors in an email address. The people for whom I wrote it liked it and thought that you might find it helpful too. My routine enforces the following few rules: * No leading or embedded blanks. * No question marks, exclamation points, or slashes. *

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• Admin Alert: The i5 Battery Checking Process

  May 9, 2007 Joe Hervtik

  What you can’t see can slow down i5 disk performance, particularly when you’re dealing with the lithium ion batteries that i5 I/O adapters use to provide hard disk drive caching. Fortunately, the system i5 will warn you about aging batteries but if you ignore its warnings, failed batteries can adversely affect disk drive performance. The good news is that it’s easy for IBM service to replace old batteries but there are a few tricks in determining when replacement is necessary. Why Regular Battery Changes Are Important Lithium ion battery packs provide power for disk caching on your i5 disk arrays.

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• Arcad Positions for Growth in Change Management

  May 8, 2007 Alex Woodie

  For many European software companies, the United States can be a difficult market to crack. In addition to differences in customs and language, the whole buying process in the U.S. is different than it is in Europe. For years, the French developer Arcad Software has tried to break into the lucrative U.S. market. Now, with the latest launch of the Arcad suite and an expansion of its office in New Hampshire, Arcad is gearing up for a sustained push into the U.S. Arcad Software sells a unique mix of programmer utilities for the System i platform. At the heart of

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• Profound Releases Genie, Lauded for Disney Work

  May 8, 2007 Alex Woodie

  This had to be one of the best COMMON conferences for Alex Roytman, chief executive of Profound Logic Software. Not only did Profound’s customer, Walt Disney World, win a System i Innovation Award for the work they did modernizing an i5/OS lodging management application, but Profound also unveiled a new product, called Genie, that has the potential to bring in many more System i shops looking to get started with modernization. Roytman was spotted entering the Anaheim Convention Center last Tuesday, the morning after IBM held its third annual System i Innovation Awards ceremony, where Walt Disney World won

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• iMessaging Adopts SIP for Call Center Software

  May 8, 2007 Alex Woodie

  iMessaging Systems, a developer of software that connects i5/OS applications with telephones, unveiled a new release of its iNspire Call Center Suite last week at the COMMON conference in Anaheim, California. With the new version, iMS has adopted the session initiation protocol (SIP) standard, which will enable its iNspire solution to integrate more easily with voice over IP (VoIP) systems, including the System i IP Telephony solution that IBM and 3Com have put together. iMS helps companies create voice-enabled applications for their i5/OS servers that include interactive voice response (IVR), intelligent call routing, custom screen pops, automatic call distribution

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