• As I See It: The Improbable Conference

  July 13, 2015 Victor Rozek

  Where IT is concerned, the United States has functioned as a nurselog for India’s booming IT sector. Soon after American management discovered that India’s cheap, plentiful, educated labor could produce cheap, plentiful, sophisticated software, so began the greatest job migration since clothing manufacturers fled the country. The skies over India darkened with incoming hardware, software specs careened off satellites, and Tower-of-Babel help desks were born. It was a rocky start, marked by resentment from threatened American workers, and cultural and language incompatibilities that plagued their Indian counterparts. But eventually everyone settled into the new normal. American IT moved on, specializing

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• IBM i Access Turns Its Attention To Database

  July 13, 2015 Dan Burger

  It’s been just about two years since IBM i Access Client Solutions (ACS) was introduced. IBM didn’t make a lot of noise about it. Maybe that’s because IBM doesn’t market products. It markets ideas. On the other hand, it might be because ACS delivered system administration with navigation features that most people have been working with for 10 to 15 years–features such as the capabilities to drag and drop, scroll down a page, and use a mouse instead of F keys. IBM i Access Client Solutions is a replacement for the severely haggard iAccess for Windows, a product with thousands

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• Looking For Stuff With iSphere

  July 7, 2015 Susan Gantner

  In my last tip I introduced you to the iSphere RDi plug-in. In this tip I’ll cover a few other features in iSphere that I find very useful. This time I’ll focus on a couple of options within iSphere that can help you search for things and subsequently edit them. The two things we’ll be searching are source members and message files. Looking For Stuff In Source Files Let’s start out with the iSphere Source File Search. This is a feature similar to PDM’s option 25 – Find String Using PDM (FNDSTRPDM). It lets you search for a string of

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• How To Create Updateable Views

  July 7, 2015 Ted Holt

  It has been said that perception is more important than reality. I agree, especially when such perception is implemented as a view in a relational database. When creating a view, it is good to keep two things in mind. First, consider that a view may be updateable or read-only. An updateable view allows the user to update rows in the table through the view, but also to insert new rows and delete rows. Read-only views may only be used when retrieving data. Both types of view are superb, and each type has its uses. One strong advantage of updateable views

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• Security Architecture For Business Applications

  July 7, 2015 Patrick Botz

  Developers can make it infinitely less complex to manage the security of a system and can significantly improve the security of any computer system by following a simple architecture in their applications. Conversely, not following a similar architecture makes it virtually impossible for any administrator to both maintain the best security possible and avoid failed and crashed applications. Nearly everyone in most IT shops assumes that it is the system (or security) administrator’s responsibility to manage access control for the data on the system. They also assume it is the administrator’s responsibility to fix any authority failure issues encountered by

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• What’s Legacy Now: WSDLs and Stored Procedures

  July 1, 2015 Alex Woodie

  Thanks to the breakneck speed that information technology is evolving, the definition of what is “legacy” in computing is constantly changing. For example, 10 years ago, organizations that were coding stored procedures into their databases and exposing mainframe business logic as WSDL-based Web services were following best practices in development. But some people are now lumping those objects into the legacy computing camp, along with old RPG and COBOL programs. The folks at OpenLegacy aren’t interested in starting a war by labeling stored procedures and first-generation WSDL-based Web services as legacy. The software modernization vendor–which last week announced a new

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• IBS Sold To Marlin

  July 1, 2015 Alex Woodie

  A new chapter in the saga of International Business Systems began Friday when the Swedish company announced that the California-based private equity firm Marlin Equity Partners has signed a definitive agreement to acquire IBS. Terms of the deal were not disclosed. Once a widely respected software company with 5,000 customers running on RPG or Java versions of its IBM i-based ERP system, IBS has struggled recently. But things appear to have stabilized of late under CEO Doug Braun’s leadership. At its annual user conference in May, the company announced that it signed 200 contracts during 2014, which it said counted

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• Magic Goes In-Memory With App Framework

  July 1, 2015 Alex Woodie

  Magic Software recently launched a new release of its application development and runtime framework that features in-memory data grid (IMDG) technology. The IMDG–which will eventually support IBM i–will bolster the scalability, stability, and elasticity of applications developed with xpa Application Platform 3.0, the company says. Scalability is one of the most common worries that keep enterprise application architects up and night, especially in this age of big data. What happens to the app if I add 1,000 more users? What about 100,000? Can my database handle more data? Will I need to redesign the application using non-relational technology? What is

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• Vendor Patches VTLs So You Don’t Have To

  July 1, 2015 Alex Woodie

  IBM i shops that don’t have the time to properly patch and update their virtual tape libraries (VTLs) may be interested in a new service unveiled by Dynamic Solutions International (DSI). For a small fee, the Colorado company will patch and update its Linux-based VTLs in customer accounts, leaving IBM i admins to focus on other things. IBM i shops may not be doing all they can to secure their environments, but they’re usually pretty good about applying integrity PTFs from IBM and loading them onto their Power Systems servers. But when it comes to applying security updates and patches

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• cozTools Brings Subscription Pricing To Software Licensing

  July 1, 2015 Dan Burger

  Cozzi Productions, maker of the SQL Query File software, is now offering a monthly software license option with a cancel anytime feature. Rather than paying the entire software license fee up front, as is traditionally done with software purchases, the subscription-based model lowers the entry point cost for software acquisition. There is no money down and the first three months are free for new customs who sign up before the end of the year–December 31, 2015. The value proposition of subscription-based pricing varies from company to company. But one of the factors that are most commonly cited is the

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