• IBM i Open Source Business Architect Lays Out A Plan

  January 18, 2017 Dan Burger

  Enterprise level application development is no place for open source languages. Can you believe it? That was once the widely accepted truth. Jiminy Crickets! Things have changed. The number of the stable open source distributions available with comprehensive support and maintenance goes well beyond common knowledge. Industry giants, successful SMB players, and mom and pop businesses are finding good reasons to use open source. Even IBM uses open source for internal business reasons.

  There are reasons for you to do the same.

  Before you recoil and brace for a “mind your own business and I’ll mind mine” retaliation against open …

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• The IBM i Year In Review

  December 14, 2016 Alex Woodie

  With another year almost in the books for the IBM i community, we thought it was time to reminisce on the top stories of 2016. Security vulnerabilities, hacked AS/400s, blockbuster acquisitions, new releases of the operating system, and major conferences all garnered their share of digital ink. Here’s a rundown on the top IBM i-related stories making news this year. It started innocently enough, way back in. . . January . . .When we asked “what should you do with your spare CPWs?” After all, you can’t take ’em with you. But with so much processing oomph on those brawny

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• IBM i Modernization Gets a Newlook Accelerator

  December 14, 2016 Dan Burger

  Legacy applications tend to outlive the predictions of their imminent demise. The trouble they cause can be costly, though, as maintenance and vanishing skills for out-of-date programming languages are problems. Modernizing applications remains a priority in many IBM midrange shops, where reuse of existing IBM i 5250 screens and RPG (and COBOL) code is being closely examined. Tools like Accelerator from Surround Technologies and Newlook from Looksoftware are getting attention, too. The latest collaboration from these two software vendors results in the generation of an IBM i-based user interface that’s accessible from any desktop or mobile device with a browser.

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• Rocket Adds IBM i Support to Backup Reporting Tool

  December 14, 2016 Alex Woodie

  IBM i shops that find it difficult to track the state of their backups across IBM and non IBM platforms may want to check out the latest product news from Rocket Software. Last week the company announced that its Servergraph Professional product now supports IBM i, thereby enabling customers to view BRMS backup status alongside that of other backup tools, like NetBackup and TSM. Considering the amount of data stored by the average enterprise these days, it’s clear that backup has transformed into a major application workload in its own right. Ensuring the integrity of backups has always been

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• Mad Dog 21/21: Ginni And The Jinns

  December 14, 2016 Hesh Wiener

  Did you ever have a run of terrible luck, when just about everything seemed to be going awry? You might be somebody who shrugs off mud spatters of misfortune. If so, you wouldn’t be Salman Rushdie, who has composed a whole world in which imps, the kind called jinns in Islamic mythology, pop up all over the place causing havoc and misery. His novel Two Years contains such a world, one that coincidentally might seem familiar to Virginia Rometty, whose spell at the helm of IBM has been marred by mayhem. Perhaps the jinns are picking on Ginni. In

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• Happy Holidays And Big Changes Ahead For IT Jungle In 2017

  December 14, 2016 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  If you can say one thing about the AS/400 through IBM i community, it is one that demonstrates the longevity of ideas that are ahead of their time. IT Jungle, which has been publishing since July 2001, is one of the whippersnappers in this market, although The Four Hundred in various forms has been publishing since July 1989. And still, we are young. It is with this long history in mind, which is so much shorter than the System/3 machines that came out in 1969, when many of us here at IT Jungle were either unborn or (comically) had

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• RPG And The BLOB

  December 13, 2016 Hey, Mike

  I’m trying to use a SELECT/INTO embedded SQL statement in an RPG program that accesses a table that includes a BLOB(20K) column. The INTO target is an externally defined data structure based on the table. However, I get compiler errors unless I remove the BLOB column from the table. What’s up with that? —Four Hundred Guru reader The problem is that RPG doesn’t have a native data type equivalent of a BLOB (or the other large object types CLOB/DBCLOB, for that matter.) The reason for this is that large object types can be up to 2GB in size, far

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• How Do You Do That with RDi? Part 2: Compile

  December 13, 2016 Susan Gantner

  In an earlier tip, I began a series on how I do things using RDi that some people seem to prefer doing in PDM. In that first tip, I talked about various ways to copy a source member. In this tip, I’ll talk about compiling with RDi. I must confess to being baffled by the number of people I talk to who, while they do all their editing in RDi, always go back to PDM to do their compiles. To me, if you don’t compile your code with RDi, you’re missing out on a huge time-saver: the ability to

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• Talking Change Management With Chrono-Logic

  December 12, 2016 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  There is, we think, a bit of a resurgence in the IBM i community when it comes to software change management tools, which have always been one of the workhorse pillars of the vendor community and one of the key functions that need to be automated in the datacenter. To get a sense of what is happening in the software change management arena, we had a chat with Ghislain Jacques, vice president of development at Chrono-Logic, a long-established vendor in the IBM i market that has expanded its product lines and boosted its aspirations to get more IBM i

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• New LUG Spreads ‘MAGIC’ In The Mid-Atlantic

  December 12, 2016 Alex Woodie

  Starting next month, a broad swath of IBM i professionals along the eastern seaboard will have their very own local user group (LUG) to call home. Dubbed the Mid-Atlantic Group of IBM i Collaborators, or MAGIC, the group hopes to create a sense of IBM i community across a large region of the country where visible support for the platform was lagging. If you’ve been around the IBM midrange for any length of time, you realize how much the community has shrunk in size. Instead of semi-annual COMMON conferences that attracted 4,000 devoted AS/400 and iSeries enthusiasts twice a year,

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