• A Style Guide For Modern RPG And ILE, Part 1

  October 4, 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 and an article to follow are a style guide to coding RPG programs using free-form RPG in an ILE environment. When developing guidelines and standards, one of the major challenges is to determine what is a standard and what is a guideline. For example, code indentation would be a standard, but whether the code is indented by two,

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• What’s In A Save File?

  October 4, 2016 Ted Holt

  Note: The code accompanying this article is available for download here. Juliet wondered, “What’s in a name?” Ted wondered, “What’s in a save file?” The Display Save File (DSPSAVF) command would show me only so much, so I wrote a utility to give me more information. Maybe it will be helpful to you. It’s common for me to exchange save files with other IBM i professionals. One problem I often run into is that someone (who might be me) cannot restore a save file to their system because the save file was created for a more recent release of

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• Searching Source In The Twenty-First Century

  October 4, 2016 Ted Holt

  I love it when IBM gives me a way for me to do something I couldn’t do before. When I think of the tools I had to work with three decades ago, I could almost weep. Recently I had to search a source member for a string of characters, and I was overjoyed that LPEX gave me what SEU couldn’t. To set the stage for my requirement, I should mention that as a matter of practice, I qualify data structures in my RPG programs. For me to omit the qualified keyword, I have to have a reason. dcl-ds Status qualified;

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• IBM Prepping For October Power Systems Push

  October 3, 2016 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  It is officially the autumn now, and that usually means Power Systems hardware and software announcements from IBM. IBM is not going to refresh its commercial Power Systems line with Power8+ processors this year, as it might have done with the strategy from years past, but as we pointed out a few weeks ago, there is a Power8 chip with integrated NVLink ports aimed at hybrid supercomputers. An aside: Europeans say “autumn” because it sounds less severe that “fall,” a reference to deciduous forests losing their leaves I presume, but autumn only came into English usage from Latin by

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• Private Big Iron Power8 Clouds To Puff Up With IBM i

  October 3, 2016 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Last month, at the Edge conference in Las Vegas, IBM rolled out a new subset of the Power Systems line aimed at midrange and large enterprises that want to build private clouds. In the past, IBM’s cloud efforts have been centered around its low-end Power machinery, with one or two sockets, with the assumption that companies want to build Power clouds that look like distributed, virtual, and orchestrated systems based on Intel Xeon E5 processors. This is not necessarily a valid assumption. A cloud is about orchestration and automation, not about a particular form factor and NUMA scalability of a

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• 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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