• An Introduction to Processing XML with RPG, Part 4

  November 17, 2015 Jon Paris

  Note: The code accompanying this article is available for download here. In the first three parts of this series, I focused on the basics of using RPG’s XML-INTO. In this episode I want to wrap things up by covering two of the more recent additions to this support. Let’s start with namespaces. I haven’t got time to go into all the whys and wherefores of namespaces. For now let’s just say that they allow you avoid name collisions by qualifying element and attribute names. Since you will encounter them in many documents it is important to understand the

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• Formatting Dates with SQL, Take 3

  November 17, 2015 Hey, Ted

  Great technique shared! Function overloading is a real boon to SQL programming. Here’s another way that requires less code and is less invasive (i.e., you won’t have to recompile anything.) Leave your original FMTDATE function alone and add the following to the SQL source: create function xxx/fmtdate (inDate varchar(8), inFromFmt varchar(8), inToFmt varchar(8)) returns varchar(10) language SQL specific FMTDATEA deterministic returns null on null input begin declare DateNum numeric (8,0); declare OutDate varchar(10); set DateNum = decimal(inDate); set OutDate = FmtDate(DateNum, inFromFmt, inToFmt); return OutDate; end I’ve used this technique to overload many user-defined functions and keep the HLL programming

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• Data Scrubbing Functions In DB2 For i

  November 17, 2015 Hey, Mike

  Imagine a character database field that stores a phone number. No formatting rules are involved, so the values in the column vary such as 8370155738, 837/015-5738, 837-015.5738, etc. We’d like to write an RPG program that allows the user to enter a number, formatted or not, onto the screen and if that string of numbers is found in the table’s phone column, show it to the user. Is there a way to use SQL to strip the non-numeric characters from the phone field, and select the record if the result matches the user input? –Brad Hi, Brad. Scrubbing data is

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• What Good Is Native .NET On Power?

  November 16, 2015 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  As many of you know, most of us at IT Jungle have advocated for some form of support for the Windows Server platform on Power-based systems since the advent of the PowerPC Alliance nearly 25 years ago. Back then, there really wasn’t a Windows Server platform at all, in fact, and it was not until that alliance that two things became clear: Microsoft had aspirations as a system software provider, and it intended to start down that road by making its Windows desktop operating system available on Power, Alpha, MIPS, and X86 processors. Except for a few months in the

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• Technology Refreshes Go Unnoticed By Most IBM i Shops

  November 16, 2015 Dan Burger

  The IBM midrange community is full of normal people trying to keep the lid on a can of worms and make a living. In the pursuit of what should be two simple and compatible objectives, there’s a lot of fancy dancing going on. What has to get done today overrides the broader view of what could be done. The IBM i development team rolls out Technology Refreshes, but relatively few take notice. On Friday, November 20, Technology Refresh (TR) 11 for IBM i 7.1 and TR 3 for IBM i 7.2 will become generally available, or GA in the lingo

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• Move Your IBM i To The Cloud On Your Own Terms

  November 16, 2015 Alex Woodie

  One of the biggest technology shifts in history–the move to cloud computing–is currently occurring. But technology pros at many organizations–in particular those running IBM i servers–are fearful about what a move to the cloud will mean for them and their organization. The good news, says Denovo Ventures CTO Richard Dolewski, is that IBM i pros can make the move on their own terms. The cloud is still fairly new to most IBM i professionals. While IBM i cloud deployments are growing, arguably less than 10 percent of IBM i workloads are cloud-based at this time. However, all signs point to

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• Mad Dog 21/21: Time, Like Gas, Passes; Love, Like Stardom, Fades

  November 16, 2015 Hesh Wiener

  IBM’s Watson said the main themes of Bob Dylan‘s song lyrics were that time passes and love fades. Dylan said this sounded about right. Both were kidding: The obvious point of the television commercial featuring this insipid exchange between machine and man was that there are no fools like old fools. Mr. Dylan, for non-AARP folk, was a pop music icon decades ago, when IBM was the emperor of computing; today, Dylan, a wrinkled old fart, is at best the second most important living entertainer from Minnesota, long since eclipsed by the timely and relevant Garrison Keillor.

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• HelpSystems’ Application Integration Begins With GUI

  November 16, 2015 Dan Burger

  Almost every IBM midrange shop faces integration issues. The next piece of the IT puzzle has to fit in with existing environment, or the system that was functional 15 years ago requires modernization to make it functional today and into the foreseeable future. You’re lucky if you are only dealing with one piece of the puzzle at a time. In fact, that rarely happens. You have to sort through a pile of priorities and make a plan. You need a road map. Integration lessons come in all shapes and sizes and varying degrees of difficulty. Sometimes we learn quickly and

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• IBM i Development Team Considering Native .NET

  November 9, 2015 Dan Burger

  Zero tolerance for AIX. It’s an exaggeration, but not that much of an exaggeration within the IBM midrange community. There is a small amount of tolerance. And where there is tolerance, the seeds of open source have an opportunity to sprout and grow. PHP has shown that open source can be accepted as a viable application development environment. Ruby, Python, and Node.js are relatively new to the platform and are trying to gain a foothold. Now get ready for open source .NET. Don’t expect IBM to drop .NET on your doorstep next week, next month, or next year. But it’s

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• Spring Ahead, Fall Behind

  November 9, 2015 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Many of us have been in this community for a long time, and whether or not we mean to, some of us still call our platform the AS/400, or “the four hundred,” or even the iSeries because old habits die hard. Call it what you will, but this is still a community, and it is one that we are members of and, for the most part, one we are all proud to be members. I, for one, wish that we had a better sense of the breadth and depth of this community, something a bit more than just the results

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