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Rocket: We’re More Than the Sum of Our (IBM i) Parts

October 7, 2015 Alex Woodie

Over the years, Rocket Software has bought some well-known properties in the IBM i space: Aldon, Seagull, BlueZone, iCluster. But now the Massachusetts company wants the IBM i community to think of it as a wider source of innovation for the platform, and a one-stop shop for IBM i products–including the new Rocket Mobile for i it launched at this week’s COMMON conference in Florida.

“If you look throughout our portfolio,” Rocket CEO Andy Youniss says, “we have this wide variety and spectrum of products. We’ve done a really bad job of telling that story to the i world because

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IBM i Knowledge Sharing: RSE Keyboard Shortcuts

October 7, 2015 Dan Burger

A thing of beauty is a joy to behold. For programmers, that thing of beauty is called a shortcut. The more you have, the greater the joy. Most RPG programmers know some shortcuts. Some are hoarded, but more often they get passed around with an “it’s better to give than receive” attitude. Call it karma, if you will. If you can go along with that, let me introduce you to the Queen of Karma–Susan Gantner.

Gantner is famous in the IBM i community for coming up with programming shortcuts. They’re tacked to cubical walls, taped to computer monitors, laminated to

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Keeping Firmware Up To Date

October 6, 2015 Pete Massiello

Last month, Larry Bolhuis discussed PTFs and keeping them current. This is extremely important, and I want to continue along on that theme of staying current. So, this month we will discuss determining the level of firmware of your Flexible Service Processor (FSP). If you don’t know what level it is currently running, you won’t know if it is up to date or not. It’s just as important to keep this up to date as your PTFs, your release of IBM i, or your Hardware Management Console (HMC) firmware. In all my travels, it seems people aren’t keeping their

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Scratch Message Files? Why Not?!

October 6, 2015 Ted Holt

If you read this august publication, you probably know what a scratch file is. (For those of you who know nothing about computers and read this publication solely for its sterling literary merit, a scratch file is a database table or stream file that is used temporarily within a job.) Today I invite you to consider that the advantages of scratch files also extend to scratch message files.

Consider superb RPG program SUPERBPGM2:

ctl-opt  dftactgrp(*no);

dcl-pr  SuperbPgm2    extpgm('SUPERBPGM2');
   ouStatus       likeds(Status_t);
   inPlant        char(12);
end-pr;

dcl-pi  SuperbPgm2;
   ouStatus       likeds(Status_t);
   inPlant        char(12);
end-pi;

dcl-ds  Status_t    qualified  template;
   MsgID          char( 7);
   ProgramName    char(10);
   Plant

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DB2 for i 7.1 TR10 and i 7.2 TR2 Features, Part 1

October 6, 2015 Michael Sansoterra

This is just another great DB2 feature tip, calling attention to some useful features available in the recent releases of DB2 for i. To determine whether you can use these recent features, check with your IBM i administrator to make sure your database group PTF levels are up to date. For IBM i 7.1 the database group PTF level should be at least 34, and for 7.2 the database group PTF level should be at least 5.

VARCHAR_FORMAT_BINARY and VARBINARY_FORMAT

Two new functions were added to the DB2 for i built-in function arsenal that will assist developers with the annoying

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Auditing Object Changes In A Production Environment

September 29, 2015 Ron Adams

Like many business environments today, my shop consists of just one person wearing many hats to support the IBM i system. This makes for a tight, controlled environment with that one person managing the system very efficiently. However, most auditors aren’t too pleased with this setup as it opens the door for potential violations with established compliance guidelines. Even though we are a small shop with minimal budget, we were able to easily develop a solution to satisfy the auditors. Here’s what we did.

Most environments like ours are run by individuals with high integrity and dedication to their jobs

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Easy Conversion To ASCII

September 29, 2015 Ted Holt

The system we love so well has a long love affair with the EBCDIC collating sequence, but most of the world runs on ASCII and Unicode. Dealing with ASCII data has not been a trivial experience for RPG programmers, but IBM i 7.2 adds a feature that helps immensely.

In ancient days, RPG programmers would call the QDCXLATE API, which uses a translation table, to convert EBCDIC to ASCII. This is probably not a good solution. IBM’s translation tables were good for their time, but times have changed.

A modern solution is the iconv family of code conversion APIs, which

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More iSphere Goodies

September 29, 2015 Susan Gantner

Before I proceed with this latest installment on the features of the iSphere toolset that plugs into RDi, I want to first update a few items I’ve covered in earlier tips in this series.

First of all, in my first iSphere tip, I neglected to give credit to one of the primary contributors to the iSphere toolset. I had mentioned the team at TaskForce IT, but failed to acknowledge the significant work done by Thomas Raddatz of Tools400. My apologies to Thomas for that omission.

Second, thanks to continued development efforts, a new version of the iSphere plug-in is

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Six Signs Of The Long, Slow Decline Of ERP

September 28, 2015 Alex Woodie

For the past 20 years, the class of applications known as enterprise resource planning (ERP) has largely dominated the business software discussion. But that hegemony is now slipping due to a variety of factors, leading some to speculate that ERP’s heyday is in the past. The big question then becomes: What should companies do next?

If you work at a company of appreciable size (say $50 million in sales or more), chances are good you rely on an ERP system that doesn’t just plan (as the name suggests) but actually executes the business processes that make your business tick. Whether

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Bootstrap Responsive To IBM i Mobile Development

September 28, 2015 Dan Burger

Do you know a good mobile application when you see one? I’ll bet you do. Although the IBM midrange community lives in a predominately green-screen world and uses outdated terminology like AS/400, iSeries, and System i, we see what’s going on around us. It doesn’t matter if you are an application developer, an app dev manager, or the worried owner of a company with concerns about the current state of the business applications.

It’s not difficult to compare what you have application-wise with what is becoming the norm: Web applications that look better and work better on both desktop and

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