• Product Highlights From Spring COMMON 2016

  May 18, 2016 Alex Woodie

  As the world’s largest gathering of IBM i professionals, COMMON‘s Annual Meeting and Expo is a natural place to announce new products. This year’s event in New Orleans, Louisiana, is no different, as IBM i vendors unveiled new and improved wares across a range of product categories. We’ll dive into more depth on most of these products in future issues of The Four Hundred, but for now here’s a quick run-down on the products turning our heads at the show. Fresche Legacy “Heatmap” tool Before embarking upon an application modernization project, it’s good to know how the existing

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• Townsend Brings Modern Crypto Capabilities To Legacy RPG Apps

  May 18, 2016 Alex Woodie

  The field-level encryption capability that IBM introduced with IBM i 7.1 is a powerful tool for securing sensitive data. However, IBM i shops that have not modernized their legacy RPG applications with SQL access methods find it difficult to use. That should change with new technology coming out of Townsend Security this week at the COMMON conference in New Orleans. The DB2 field procedure exit point that IBM launched in 2010 helped a lot of IBM i shops to encrypt their data on a field-level. The capability to encrypt pieces of sensitive data residing in particular parts of their DB2

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• Manufacturer Leans In On Shop Floor Automation

  May 18, 2016 Alex Woodie

  When Hoffmaster finally flipped the switch on its ERP migration at the end of February, IT director Rick Dittberner was nervous. Not only was the paper-goods supplier consolidating a manufacturing site on Infor ERP LX, but it was also replacing an old shop floor reporting system with a new one from Crossroads RMC. There was a lot that could go wrong for the IBM i shop. Hoffmaster is a half-a-billion-dollar manufacturer of disposable tabletop paper products, including plates, cups, cutlery, napkins, placemats, and table covers. You can find products from the Oshkosh, Wisconsin, company’s consumer division in stores such

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• Rocket Brings Mobile App DevOps Into The IBM i Fold

  May 18, 2016 Alex Woodie

  Rocket Software is launching a new tool that simplifies the management and distribution of mobile application source code. Called Rocket Lifecycle for Mobile, the new software is designed to make it easier for IBM i shops to manage the DevOps lifecycle for today’s modern applications, which involve not only closely administered servers but also widely dispersed smartphones. Mobile application development continues to be a hot trend in the IBM i space, as smartphones become more woven into our personal and professional lives. Four out of 10 IBM i shops have a mobile computing initiative, according to HelpSystems‘ 2016 IBM

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• Responsive Design, Node.js Top BCD App Dev Enhancements

  May 18, 2016 Dan Burger

  It’s really difficult to overstate the importance of application development to any organization. It’s a simple tool, but it needs to be the right tool. When done right, it’s crucial to business efficiency. Getting it right and keeping it simple is the target, yet somehow the aim differs wildly from the result. Shoot fast but shoot straight. Don’t just hit the target. Hit the bull’s eye. BCD Software is one of several application development vendors in the IBM midrange market that can help application developers shoot fast and straight. The company has a new release of its desktop and mobile

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• DB2 for i 7.2 TR3 and 7.1 TR11 Features

  May 17, 2016 Michael Sansoterra

  I was writing up some exciting stuff on the new IBM i 7.3 features when I realized I never finished reporting about other recent DB2 features! Below are highlights of some newer features offered starting in DB2 for i 7.2 TR3 and 7.1 TR11. Assign A System Name To A Global Variable Recall that when you create a global variable, behind the scenes SQL Server implements the variable’s logic and value retrieval logic as a service program. The following variable definition with a long name (>10 characters): CREATE OR REPLACE VARIABLE DEV.AVENGERS_TOWER VARCHAR(32) DEFAULT (SELECT ADDRESS FROM DEV.HERO WHERE

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• Build SQL to Define Your Existing Files, Take 2

  May 17, 2016 Ted Holt

  Converting physical files to tables is a good thing to do, but if you work in the sorts of shops where I’ve worked, you already have more than you can do and you don’t have time to fix what isn’t broken. However, if I could make it easy for you, maybe you’d find the time to convert physical files where doing so is to most advantageous. Let me show you how easy it can be. First, you need a place to put the SQL DDL (data definition language) source. crtpf mylib/sqlsrc Second, you need an SQL client. I have used

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• RDi Debug Without SEPs

  May 17, 2016 Susan Gantner

  I wrote a tip way back in 2007 about how easy it is to start a debug session using Service Entry Points (SEPs). Back then, the tool was still called WDSC, and at that time I mentioned that there were some occasions when SEPs wouldn’t work. So what can you do if you’re in one of those situations? You can’t set an SEP on a program whose member type doesn’t end in LE. For example, with RPG or CLP programs. That’s not to say that you can’t debug non-LE programs when using SEPs–you simply can’t use one of those program

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• Jazzing Up IBM i In COMMON’s Quarter

  May 16, 2016 Alex Woodie and Dan Burger

  New Orleans has taken on a decidedly IBM i tint thanks to the start of COMMON‘s Annual Meeting and Expo over the weekend. An estimated 1,100 attendees are in the Big Easy for the four-day show, which began Sunday morning with remarks by COMMON president Kevin Mort, and also featured a glimpse into the future of Power Systems, courtesy of IBM Power Systems executives Steve Sibley and Stephanie Chiras. The spring COMMON conference is still the biggest IBM i show on earth and provides attendees a chance to beef up their skills, socialize with other IBM i professionals, check

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• Zend Touts 2X Speedup With PHP 7 And New Runtime

  May 16, 2016 Alex Woodie

  The new release of Zend‘s PHP development language and PHP runtime will run twice as fast on Intel Xeon and IBM Power servers than previous versions, the company says. IBM i customers won’t need to do anything to take advantage of the speedup except use the new runtime, which should be available in the coming weeks. Zend, which is now owned by Rogue Wave Software, last week officially announced Zend Server 9, the newest version of the Zend runtime for Intel platforms. Zend Server 9 is based on PHP version 7, the newest version of the language, which

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