• Agilysys Delivers Upgrades to Back Office and Customer-Facing Software

  October 19, 2016 Dan Burger

  The notion that what goes on in the IT departments of companies in the gaming industry translates into IT departments of every other business is not a long-shot bet. The gaming business–casinos and their tentacles that reach into restaurants and lodging–is as customer-focused as any business you can name. And, as many of you know, it’s a bastion of IBM midrange computing–an important niche in the IBM i ecosystem. Developments here often fan out to other industries when business efficiencies and increased revenue generation opportunities have been demonstrated. Agilysys, with its property management, inventory and procurement software Stratton Warren

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• Zend Preps Speedy New PHP and Runtime for IBM i

  October 19, 2016 Alex Woodie

  Zend today will officially launch the beta program for Zend Server for IBM i version 9 and the new PHP 7 language running on the Power Systems platform. The combination of the new language and runtime, which are being unveiled at the annual ZendCon 2016 show in Las Vegas this week, is expected to give customers a big boost in performance for their PHP applications, provided they don’t run into backward compatibility breaks that Zend built into the framework. Performance is the definite headliner for the new PHP 7 language and Zend Server runtime. As we told you back in

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• A Style Guide for Modern RPG and ILE, Part 2

  October 18, 2016 Paul Tuohy

  One of the basic principles of programming is that coding conventions (guidelines and standards) improve the readability of source code and make software maintenance easier. Coding conventions provide the foundation for developing applications that are easy to maintain and modify. This article completes the style guide to coding RPG programs using free-form RPG in an ILE environment started in A Style Guide For Modern RPG And ILE, Part 1. Older Functions When using free-form RPG (and nothing but free-form RPG), a lot of the old RPG “functionality” is no longer available (e.g., operation codes such as MOVE, MOVEL, GOTO,

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• Replacing Source in The Twenty-First Century

  October 18, 2016 Ted Holt

  In Searching Source in The Twenty-First Century, I introduced the use of regular expressions for searching within a source member. Searching is great, but sometimes you need to replace what the system finds with something else. Here’s how to replace text when using regular expressions. Let’s begin with a source member. Notice that there are nine constants named Stat10 through Stat90. Let’s replace Stat with Status_. Obviously we can’t replace Stat with Status everywhere it’s found. That would be disastrous! Instead, let’s use a regular expression to find the instances where Stat is followed by a digit. I

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• SQL PL Conditional Structures

  October 18, 2016 Ted Holt

  Recently I gave a brief introduction to the SQL Procedures Language, or SQL PL, a procedural language that works with the DB2 family of database management systems. Today I present the conditional structures, IF and CASE. If you so choose, you will master them in minutes. But first, I need to clear up one matter. In my previous article, I referred to SQL PL as a proprietary language. Mike Cain, of the DB2 for i Center of Excellence, emailed to correct my error. Mike pointed out that SQL PL is based on SQL/Persistent Stored Modules (SQL/PSM), which is an

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• The Negative Impact Of Software Pricing On The IBM i Community

  October 17, 2016 Pete Massiello

  Here is an important question: Are some independent software vendors having a negative impact on IBM i? You are probably thinking that this question is a little harsh. But time and time again, I continue to get questions from customers on this issue. As such, I feel compelled to address it and take a look at what is currently going on. Starting with a little history will help. Back–and I mean way back when the AS/400 was first announced nearly 30 years ago–remember what the AS in AS/400 stood for: Application Systems. Without a doubt, the success of the

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• IBM Brings DDR4 Memory To Bear On Power Systems

  October 17, 2016 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Every new generation of DDR main memory brings advantages of lower latency, higher frequency, higher bandwidth, and lower energy consumption, and this is always a good thing for any server platform. The Power8 systems that launched in 2014 with the Power8 processors were based on DDR3 technology, which was mature at the time and, frankly, less costly for IBM to deploy in its systems then DDR4 DIMMs would have been. Now that DDR4 pricing has come down, thanks in large part to the widespread adoption of this chip technology by Intel‘s “Haswell” and now “Broadwell” lines of Xeon E5

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• IBM i Open Source Roadmap Finds Perl

  October 17, 2016 Dan Burger

  Support for open source development on IBM i has been a big deal for the Technology Refresh program. Just last week, with the latest TR announcement, support for Perl was added along with support for the current version of Node.js, which is v6. In previous TRs, we have seen support for programming languages like Ruby and Python, plus tools such as the GNU Compiler Collection and Git. The PHP language, the Eclipse integrated development environment, and the Apache web server are pre-TR open source advancements. Compared to Node.js, Python, Ruby, and PHP, there’s not much happening in terms of new

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• IBM i Finally Gets Native Cloud Backup

  October 17, 2016 Alex Woodie

  One of the most compelling announcements out of IBM last week was the launch of Cloud Storage Solutions for i. The new offering, which becomes available October 28 with a starting cost of $2,400, will allow customers on IBM i 7.1 or later to back up to 1TB on IBM’s cloud, directly through BRMS. Some may even be able to get rid of their tape drives entirely, IBM says. Cloud storage isn’t new, of course. It’s not even new on the IBM i platform, thanks to the work of a number of managed service providers (MSPs) who have been offering

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• Mobile Apps As Easy As RPG III

  October 17, 2016 Dan Burger

  You probably don’t know Chris Rushak. But the odds that you know someone like him are pretty high. In fact, you might be the person who has a lot in common with him. Rushak is an RPG developer with a boatload of experience coding green-screen applications from scratch. He’s done it for decades and is comfortable with his fixed-format RPG III skills. Those green-screen applications do the job just fine. But then came the request for a mobile application. The business problem was an inability to accurately track inventory from the receiving area to the warehouse and then to production

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