• IBM To Start Charging For Power Systems Shipping And Handling

  May 21, 2012 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  If you have been shopping for stuff online in the past several years, you know that the cost of shipping things has gone through the roof. And IBM is well aware of this too, and is not about to absorb the shipping costs on Power Systems gear when its peers in the server racket charge for shipping and handling. To that end, in announcement letter 112-066 and in a further clarification in announcement letter 212-239, IBM explained that staring on July 10, it will be adding shipping and handling features to selected Power Systems equipment. The shipping and handling

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• Double-Digit Growth For Supply Chain Management Software Sellers

  May 21, 2012 Jenny Thomas

  Despite uncertain economic times in most industries, IT related or not, there’s at least one group that’s got a reason to smile. According to a recent report from the analysts at Gartner, the worldwide supply chain management software market grew 12.3 percent in 2011, totaling out at a whopping $7.7 billion. Just two years ago, IT Jungle reported on slumping sales in SCM software revenue, which hit a mere $6.2 billion in 2009. The jump in 2011 is actually the second year of double-digit growth for the SCM software market. There wasn’t any shuffling for position amongst the top

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• Boolean Variables: Underused and Unappreciated

  May 16, 2012 Ted Holt

  Boolean variables can have only two values: true and false. In CL, they are known as logical variables. In RPG, they’re called indicator variables. They’re not essential; I got by without them for years. But they are useful. Let’s take a closer look at Boolean variables. Let me share a story with you. Some years ago, a certain factory started faxing requirements reports to their suppliers. The suppliers liked the reports, but some of them asked if they might receive the requirements electronically in a spreadsheet format. The IT department added a one-digit code to the database. 1=send by

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• Generic Processing, Continued

  May 16, 2012 Ted Holt

  Imagine needing to delete a large number–50, 100, 1,000–device descriptions, all of which begin with the same group of characters, from your system. Now imagine the Delete Device Description (DLTDEVD) command not accepting a generic device name. That got ugly quickly, didn’t it? And yet that sort of thing is what programmers often force end users to do. Maybe we need to add generic processing to our applications. I have written about generic names before. (See Related Stories at the end of this article.) But I have not written about using generic values in the context of application development. Suppose

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• Preventing Your System from Restarting After a Full System Backup

  May 16, 2012 Hey, Joe

  Good article on the secrets of the IBM i IPL parameters. Is there a way to stop the system from restarting after my full system backups complete (GO SAVE, option 21)? There are times that it would be great for the system to stay in restricted state after a backup, but the startup CL program always runs. How do I stop it from running? –Doug Here’s the drill for changing your System i and Power i partitions so that they don’t kick off their system startup programs after a GO SAVE, option 21, full system backup. First, realize that

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• LANSA Moves into Native Mobile App Development

  May 15, 2012 Dan Burger

  Mobile application development isn’t always what you think it is. Real IBM i business applications that render on the most popular tablets and smartphones, for instance, do not require RPG programmers to learn HTML5, CSS3, PHP, JavaScript, Java, or Objective-C. Last week, LANSA released a tool for creating apps using RPG/CL with DDS. Those apps will run natively on iPhone and iPad devices now and Android compatibility will be added within a couple of months. LANSA calls this new product LongRange, which is not to be confused with LongReach, the free iOS file-sharing client that LANSA launched late last year

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• Townsend Delivers Fine-Grained IBM i Log Data to SIEMs

  May 15, 2012 Alex Woodie

  It’s a big, bad, scary world out there. Cyber-criminals are constantly probing networks, looking for places to plant malware and do their nasty business. To thwart these attempts, an organization needs a good security plan, and possibly invest in a security information and event management (SIEM) program that monitors and correlates all IT activity. Townsend Security recently issued a new release of its Alliance LogAgent Suite that will help protect the IBM i platform by providing SIEMs with more detailed and fine-grained IBM i log data. Townsend Security president Patrick Townsend began his COMMON press conference last week with a

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• Raz-Lee Unloads New Products at COMMON

  May 15, 2012 Alex Woodie

  Raz-Lee Security has been on a roll lately. Earlier this year, it launched DB-Gate, which makes external databases like SQL Server, Oracle 11g, and MySQL accessible to IBM i programs. Then at the COMMON show last week in Southern California, the Israeli software vendor launched two more products, including a change management system for the IBM i server and multi-LPAR support for its products. It also provided a glimpse into a product to be released later, called iCommand. Raz-Lee says its new Change Tracker software automatically traces software modifications to IBM i programs at both the source and object levels.

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• Modernization and Mobile Lead BCD Development Efforts

  May 15, 2012 Dan Burger

  Whether working from ground zero or building on existing investments, BCD‘s application development products have long been used by IBM midrange shops. One of the reasons is BCD’s continual investment in developing its product lineup, which handles everything from quick green-screen Web-enablement to multi-platform Web development. And for companies unfamiliar with BCD, here’s a surprise–the company has a newly enhanced business intelligence tool as well. Most IBM i shops are talking about application modernization projects. And each year there are more of these projects deployed. The majority are quick and simple transformations of green-screen apps to Web apps. And

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• DRV Tech Delivers Report Writer with FlexTools V5

  May 15, 2012 Alex Woodie

  IBM i shops that use DRV Technologies‘ FlexTools software to manage their spool files now have the option to use the new DataFlex component to generate reports from their data. The new report writer, which was unveiled as part of FlexTools version 5 at last week’s COMMON conference in Anaheim, California, creates reports from DB2/400 files and outputs them in several formats. DataFlex offers IBM i shops another way to query their DB2/400 data and generate basic reports from that data. The product enables users to join multiple database files, select data by record range, and specify field selection,

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