• Four Hundred Monitor, December 9

  December 9, 2020 Jenny Thomas

  It’s funny how as you get older, longer periods of time seem to sound shorter. When you’re a kid, a year sounds like forever. But before you know it, you’re 49 wondering how you got there so fast. IBM has just announced its plans for the IBM i for the next 12 years. That’s more than a decade away, which makes it seem longer, but I think to many of us 12 years sounds like it’s just around the corner. Before you decide, check out our top story this week from IT Jungle’s editor in chief, who dissects the announcement. …

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• IBM i PTF Guide, Volume 22, Number 49

  December 9, 2020 Doug Bidwell

  Heads up, people. There are new defectives this week for IBM i 7.2, IBM i 7.3, and IBM i 7.4. Also, there is an update to Rational Developer for i, Version 9.6.0.9.

  Here is the rundown of PTF Groups by IBM i release level:

  PTF Groups 7.4:

  • HIPERs (High Impact/Pervasive)
  • Security
  • MGTools

  PTF Groups 7.3:

  • HIPERs (High Impact/Pervasive)
  • Security
  • MGTools

  PTF Groups 7.2:

  • HIPERs (High Impact/Pervasive)
  • Security
  • MGTools

  PTF Groups 7.1:

  • HIPERs (High Impact/Pervasive)

  New (or Updated) Links for this week: Nothing. Sorry! I concentrated on Thanksgiving this week.

  Tips/Definitions: Please, be safe! Mask, distance, and wash your hands –can’t …

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• 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 …

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• 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 …

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• 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 …

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• 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: …

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• 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, …

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• Open Source The Path To Software Riches For IBM i

  December 2, 2020 Alex Woodie

  For what is supposed to be a proprietary platform, the IBM i server sure has a lot of open source software running on it. In recent months, it appears that the majority of new programs introduced to IBM i are open source in nature. That pattern shows no signs of changing any time soon, according to a recent report by OpenLogic.

  Open software has existed on the IBM i platform for many years. The first highly publicized dip into the open source well occurred in 2005, when IBM partnered with a company called Zend to bring its PHP runtime to …

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• Swedish Manufacturer Plans A New Path Forward

  December 2, 2020 Alex Woodie

  The Swedish manufacturing company Dahrentrad knew its S/36-era production planning solution was getting a bit long in the tooth. The question was, what should the company do about it? Migration and modernization were weighed as the two primary options, but which was the better path?

  A subsidiary of LWW Group, Dahrentrad specializes in producing copper and aluminum wiring used in electrical motors, pumps, transformers, and other industrial and automotive components. The 75-year-old company runs factories in Sweden, Germany, and Poland.

  The company relied on an old but reliable business application that utilized 5250 greenscreen interfaces, according to Mats Lidström, …

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• Testing: The Secret Weapon Of DR Success

  December 2, 2020 Alex Woodie

  Just as every company should carry liability insurance, every company should have a disaster recovery (DR) plan. Without a plan, the odds of recovering from a disaster are meager, at best. But just having a plan isn’t good enough, either — the company must test the plan to gauge whether it will actually work.

  Whether your software runs in a server housed at your headquarters or in a giant rack in a public cloud across the state, it’s a critical element for smooth operations. While this information technology is usually reliable — and if you’re running IBM i, it’s almost …

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