• Four Hundred Monitor, August 15

  August 15, 2018 Dan Burger

  A new star was born last week. August 7 was the official launch of Power9. IT Jungle has been covering the impending launch for months, and be assured we will continue to stay on top of Power9 and how it relates to our i ecosystem. With the pace of change in tech right now, it is more important than ever to keep up on those skills, so be sure to look for opportunities for learning and collaboration with other Power Systems professionals. We also have some new blogs and podcasts to share with you this week in our Redbooks, White …

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• IBM i PTF Guide, Number 20, Volumes 31 and 32

  August 15, 2018 Doug Bidwell

  We have some catching up to do this week. Summer is winding down, the kids are going back to school, and it’s time to get things back in order in PTF Land. There actually wasn’t much to report with Volume 31 of our PTF Guide, mostly due to the announcements that were expected in time for Volume 32. Still, 31 brought us a fix pack for Rational Developer for i (9.6), as well as some new links on how to configure ObjectConnect, what system fixes are required for Domino, and the IBM i collaboration software compatibility guide.

  Here’s the defective …

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• Big Blue Moves Up Technology Refreshes For IBM i

  August 6, 2018 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  We knew that IBM was getting ready to flesh out the Power9 server lineup with the “Cumulus” processors for scale-up systems, used in machines that span from four to 16 sockets in a single system image, and we told you all about that last week for an announcement that is expected to come to pass on August 7. This is fitting with all of the rumors we heard at the beginning of the year, which expected the big iron to come in the third quarter.

  Normally, we expect Technology Refresh updates for the current versions and releases of IBM i …

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• CIO Summit Brings Execs Up To Speed On IBM i

  August 6, 2018 Alex Woodie

  The IBM i server is mystery to many. Not only does it run on abnormal hardware – at least compared to “standards-based” X86 computers – but its programming languages, user interfaces, and administrative tasks can seem otherworldly to the uninitiated. For Alan Seiden, the organizer of an IBM i-focused executive get-together known as the CIO Summit, dispelling the platform’s mystery represents something of a personal challenge.

  The next CIO Summit is in about two months, and Seiden, who’s a well-known PHP on IBM i expert as well as the founder and principle of the Seiden Group, is looking forward …

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• Guru: Beefing Up The Job Log, Take Two

  August 6, 2018 Ted Holt

  In Tracing Routines Explain Why The Computer Did What It Did, I wrote about the usefulness of writing information about program execution to determine why a program run gave certain results. Today I want to present a simpler method than the tracing routines. The tracing routines are not obsolete, but they are powerful and I have found them at times to be overkill.

  Just a word about terminology. Since I wrote that article five and a half years ago, my reading has led me to a different understanding of the terms tracing and logging. I’ve since decided that …

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• As I See It: Just Bag IT

  August 6, 2018 Victor Rozek

  Only two days in, my stay in Lassen Volcanic National Park was cut short by vanishing stars. Evidently the “new normal” knows no boundaries and has no respect for vacationers. It seems that every year now, there are fires, terrible fires, consuming the West. In Redding, California, 50 miles west of the park, 966 homes and six people were lost. More are missing. Over 90,000 acres of drought-stressed brush remain ablaze. As of this writing, 38,000 residents may have to be evacuated as swirling winds are spreading flames in all directions.

  But in the distant mountains I knew nothing of …

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• IBM i PTF Guide, Volume 20, Number 30

  August 6, 2018 Doug Bidwell

  It is summer, and it is the usual quiet time in PTF Land. This week, there are new PTF groups for HIPERs and HTTP server! There is good stuff in there. . . .

  The SAP required PTF lists were updated on July 20 for IBM i releases 7.2 and 7.3, on the July 16 they were updated for IBM i 7.1. If you are running SAP, you might check out their links on the links page.

  There are, as you know from reading The Four Hundred, new enterprise servers coming, and they are very powerful machines! And there …

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• Guru: A Bevy of BIFs – %Dec to the Rescue

  August 1, 2018 Susan Gantner

  Author’s Note: This tip was first published back in 2009. I’ve updated the code examples here to use free format declarations. In addition I’ve added the potential use of %ScanRpl, which didn’t exist at the original publication date.

  More and more in RPG applications these days, it seems we need to process data that comes from “the dark side.” Translation: from a non-i system. This data could be coming from a browser screen via an RPG CGI program, from a CSV (comma-separated values) flat file, from an XML or JSON document, or myriad other ways. One thing these dark sources …

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• Guru: An Introduction to RPG’s XML-INTO, Part 1

  August 1, 2018 Jon Paris

  Author’s Note: The original version of this article was written in the V6 timeframe and included references to V5R4. References to the V5R4 limitations have been removed from this updated version. I have also updated the data definitions to take into account RPG’s ability for the direct coding of nested data structures rather than having to use LikeDS as before.

  RPG IV’s built-in XML support has been available for some time now, having been originally introduced with V5R4 back in 2006. However, it wasn’t until the advent of V6 with its removal of many of RPG’s size limits that it …

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• Guru: Getting The Message, Part 1

  August 1, 2018 Paul Tuohy

  Author’s Note: This article was originally published in October 2009. Since then I have worked on many modernization projects with many clients and, in every one of those projects, we have used some form of the contents of this (and the following) article. The content of the article has been updated for free form RPG and some of the coding enhancements that have been introduced, into RPG, since the original publication of this piece.

  When we look at modernizing applications (or writing new applications) one of the basic principles is to tier the application — i.e., separate the interface — …

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