The Four Hundred Archives - Page 358 of 1506

Quadrant Doubles Down on Simplicity with Formtastic 10

December 2, 2015 Alex Woodie

Complexity is a killer in this brave new electronic world of ours. If your product or service is hard to use, don’t expect the masses to come knocking at your door. That ethos of simplicity echoes across all industries and businesses, and it’s the driving factor in a major new version of Quadrant Software‘s Formtastic output management software for IBM i.

Quadrant made two important changes to grease the wheels of simplicity with Formtastic 10, the first major new version of the product in years. First, it overhauled the Windows-based design tool that Formtastic customers use to create and

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HATS Now Hooked Into BlueMix Cloud

December 2, 2015 Alex Woodie

IBM i shops adopting the latest release of IBM‘s Host Access Transformation Services (HATS) product will be able to create and run their modernized interfaces on BlueMix, Big Blue’s cloud service. Support for the latest Rational development tools and improved security round out HATS 9.5, which shipped in November.

When it comes to application modernization, IBM i shops have a number of options available to them. Many of those modernization tools come from third-party vendors that you have read about in past issues of The Four Hundred and the discontinued Four Hundred Stuff, which included more than 3,000

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End of Year Feedback

December 1, 2015 Ted Holt

We’ve made it through another year. I hope it’s been a good one for you in spite of the hardships and challenges. Let’s read some of the feedback that I received in 2015 and see what we can learn.

Hey, Ted:

To make a grep search case-insensitive, use the “-i” switch. I also add the “-n” switch to show the line number.

catsplf -j 681206/MYSELF/MYJOB QSYSPRT 1 | grep -in 'smith'

I also have a SCANSPLF command. It is not case insensitive, but that would not be hard to implement.

Keep the great articles coming.

–Bryan

Bryan wrote in

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How Many Interfaces Are Enough (To Print A CSV File)?

December 1, 2015 Ted Holt

Note: The code accompanying this article is available for download here.

CSV (comma-separated values) files have been part of my working world for years. I like them because they’re easy to build. Users like them because they can easily open them in Microsoft Excel. I’ve written about this before. Let’s end the year with a utility I wrote to print CSV files. I had fun writing it. Maybe you’ll find it useful in your shop.

When I need to read a CSV file on an IBM i system, I typically FTP the file from the IFS to a temporary

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Detecting A “Job End” Condition in DB2 for i

December 1, 2015 Hey, Mike

An ETL process extracts data from our ERP system and places it in our Business Intelligence systems. It runs 24/7 except for the End of Day process that shuts down the subsystem that it’s in. The SQL process we run ends up dying violently and the parent process fails (without recovering on startup). A graceful exit would be as simple as issuing a RETURN statement! Can SQL detect a shutdown process?

–D.S.

The ANSI SQL standard offers no specific guideline for implementing some kind of host shutdown process, so you’ll have to rely on the other special OS related views

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ERP Upgrades: Love ‘Em or Leave ‘Em?

November 18, 2015 Alex Woodie

What is the value of an ERP system? At most companies that use them, the ERP suite is critical to daily functioning. Without a centralized place to run things like accounts payable and general ledger, the company simply couldn’t operate. But that line of reasoning does not appear to hold true when it comes to ERP upgrades, which companies are increasingly choosing not to perform.

A recent survey from Rimini Street shed some light on the situation surrounding ERP upgrades, specifically for Oracle customers. In its second-annual survey of Oracle customers around world, Rimini (which is a provider third-party maintenance

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Townsend Security Turns Over a New LEEF

November 18, 2015 Alex Woodie

Townsend Security‘s Alliance LogAgent software now speaks Log Event Extended Format (LEEF), a data format used by IBM‘s QRadar security information and event monitoring (SIEM) software. The two companies’ integration and development work will dramatically reduce the time spent training QRadar to understand security events happening on IBM i, says Townsend Security founder and CEO Patrick Townsend.

Practically every SIEM product on the planet supports the industry standard Syslog format. Townsend’s software can convert IBM i event data, such as events logged to the QAUDJRN, into the Syslog format so it can be consumed by 35 or so

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LANSA Shows Off Responsive Design Capabilities

November 18, 2015 Dan Burger

Designing Web pages that display on a desktop, a laptop, a tablet, or a mobile phone are no longer considered in terms of individual development efforts. That eats up too much time and often becomes an application maintenance nightmare. One development effort that results in user interfaces that correctly display regardless of the device is the new normal. Making the build process quick and the performance fast is the goal everyone is aiming for. LANSA is the latest option for making this happen.

The process of building applications with interfaces that change depending on where they’re presented–desktop, laptop, tablet, or

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IBM i Mobile Apps Made Easy

November 18, 2015 Dan Burger

As the number of IBM midrange shops building mobile applications grows, the ideas about features and functionality expands. Rising to the top of that list for many companies is the usefulness of a bar code scanner in combination with IBM i-based applications. It’s a demand that BCD Software has noticed and it led to creation of Presto Mobile, an app for accessing modernized green screens from iPhones and iPads.

Accessibility to IBM i data is a basic requirement, but the added capability of using the built-in camera as a bar code scanner is the driving force behind Presto Mobile, according

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Vision Touts MIMIX Success Stories

November 18, 2015 Alex Woodie

When it comes to high availability, few products have the installed base enjoyed by MIMIX. Owned by Vision Solutions, the logical replication-based HA solution is used by thousands of IBM i shops around the world. Vision recently published a handful of those successes in customer case studies.

One of those customers, Gränges Sweden AB, originally installed Vision Solution’s OMS/ODS, the HA product Vision sold before it bought its rival Lakeview Technology way back in 2007.

When Gränges installed the HA solution in 2001, the aluminum manufacturer was seeking a way to reduce downtime caused by nightly backups, as well

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