• Could IBM i And System z Share Easy Source?

  October 3, 2016 Dan Burger

  How far can really old, monolithic RPG code be extended? Some might say the end is in sight. Others might say if it ain’t broke, why fix it. It’s an application modernization dilemma. How much time is being devoted to application maintenance? Is the code worth saving as is, can it be modified as the basis of a modernization effort, or is it time for a total rewrite? These questions are on the minds of IBM midrange shops. There are a variety of software vendors in the application modernization business with technology and products designed to help companies make decisions

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• Big Blue Patches 14 More OpenSSL Flaws In IBM i

  October 3, 2016 Alex Woodie

  IBM i shops that use the OpenSSL encryption protocol will want to know that IBM last week issued program temporary fixes (PTFs) for 14 security vulnerabilities impacting IBM i versions 7.1, 7.2, and 7.3. If you’re running an older version of the IBM i OS, you are out of luck. Like most modern operating systems, IBM i includes a range of open source components. That includes OpenSSL, which is an open source implementation of the Transport Layer Security (TLS) and Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) wire encryption protocols that’s managed by the OpenSSL Project. As we learned following the big

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• Two Fall Conferences Are Must-See IT

  October 3, 2016 Dan Burger

  In just a few weeks, the COMMON user group has two conferences offering IBM i education. It’s good to know there are still companies and individuals that value the development of IT expertise, innovation, and industry best practices. The evolution of IBM i skills has never been more important than it is today, but overall the attendance at technical conferences has remained at about the same level for the past five years. COMMON has its Fall Conference scheduled for October 24-26 in Columbus, Ohio, and BeNeLux Power 2016–hosted by COMMON organizations in Belgium, the Netherlands, and Luxembourg is set for

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• PowerHA Implementations No Picnic; Help On The Way

  September 28, 2016 Dan Burger

  Easy as pie does not describe the implementation process for PowerHA. It can be a mind-bender, even in shops where the staffing is adequate and the skills are current. So how about something a little easier to implement and why not make it applicable to all three operating systems that run on Power? It’s coming soon, even though the official announcement has yet to be made. Easier implementation should be a big boost to PowerHA. At least that’s what Satya Sharma, CTO and IBM Power Systems Fellow, told me when we met last week at the Edge 2016 conference in

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• Why RFID Is (Finally) Here To Stay

  September 28, 2016 Alex Woodie

  Don’t look now folks, but some of the big claims that people made about radio frequency identification (RFID) a decade ago finally are starting to come true. For companies in the manufacturing and retail industries, there’s simply no denying the major efficiency gains that RFID projects are now delivering. Here are some of the reasons why RFID is finally here, and what took so long. Of course, it wasn’t supposed to take this long. When Wal-Mart issued a mandate for all of its suppliers to adopt case-level RFID tagging back 2003, the transition was expected to take about two years.

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• Tokenization Without Technical Expertise? Townsend Says It’s Here

  September 28, 2016 Alex Woodie

  Tokenization has emerged as a favorite technique for protecting sensitive data without the heavy performance, storage, and productivity hit that encryption entails. However, implementing a tokenization solution has typically required advanced development expertise, at least on the IBM i platform. Now Townsend Security has introduced a new IBM i-based tokenization solution that it says delivers the benefits of tokenization without involving programmers. Tokenization is an advanced form of encryption that’s gaining traction among banks, retailers, and payment gateways. The technique works by replacing the value of sensitive database fields, such as a credit card numbers, with randomly generated index keys,

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• PHP and IBM i: Ten Years of Magic

  September 28, 2016 Amy Anderson

  The online world recently celebrated the 25th anniversary of the World Wide Web. Young adults entering the workforce today have never known life without it. But for those who were working on green screen terminals in the mid-1990s and saw for the first time what a modem-connected PC could deliver, the World Wide Web was indistinguishable from magic. And the ability to deliver magic exploded with the emergence of a development language originally called PHP/FI. Originally created by Rasmus Lerdorf in 1994, PHP stood for personal home pages and form interpreter. It gave a new class of developers, called webmasters,

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• Raz-Lee Touts DB-Gate User Stories

  September 28, 2016 Alex Woodie

  What would you do if you were able to connect your DB2 for i database directly into another database, like SQL Server or Oracle 12c? That would probably open up all kinds of impactful use cases to support your business objectives without resorting to tiresome file transfers or expensive middleware. That’s exactly what Raz-Lee Security discovered customers were doing with its newly released database connector, called DB-Gate. In today’s data-dominated world, one would think that big relational database vendors like IBM, Oracle, and Microsoft would have solved the data connectivity issue a long time ago. After all, relational

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• RPG Talks To Watson

  September 27, 2016 Paul Tuohy

  Note: The code accompanying this article is available for download here. Yes, RPG can talk to Watson. No special software required, nothing to install, nothing to configure. You just need to be on V7R1, have the ability to use embedded SQL and write just a few lines of code–none of which are complicated. To see how it works, all you have to do is copy/paste the display file and RPG code in this article, compile and call. On the off chance that you don’t know what Watson is, Watson is the IBM computer that, in 2011, competed

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• A Brief Introduction To The SQL Procedures Language

  September 27, 2016 Ted Holt

  The SQL Procedures Language, or SQL PL, is a proprietary procedural language that IBM designed to work with the DB2 family of database management systems. I believe that it’s a good idea for anyone who works with DB2 to learn SQL PL. If you know RPG, CL, or COBOL, you’ll find it easy to learn. SQL PL is available for all the DB2s. Knowledge of SQL PL that you acquire by working with DB2 for i applies in large part to the mainframe and LUW (Linux-Unix-Windows) versions. You can use SQL PL to create stored procedures, functions, and triggers. You

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