• SOLPAC Picked by looksoftware to be Master Reseller in Japan

  January 18, 2010 Alex Woodie

  The Australian i/OS application modernization software vendor looksoftware has chosen Japanese Power Systems VAR SOLPAC to be its master reseller in Japan, the vendors announced last week. In addition to selling System i, Unix, and X64 servers, Tokyo-based SOLPAC consults on installations of Oracle and SAP ERP systems, provides Web design, delivers training and education, and runs servers and applications as a business process outsourcer (BPO). The 13-year-old company employs 220 people and had gross sales of 2,750 million yen (about $30 million) per year, according to its Web site. That makes it one of IBM‘s biggest business partners

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• Music Publisher Sings Praises of System Optimization from Vision Solutions

  January 18, 2010 Dan Burger

  Carlin Music is no one-hit wonder. It’s one of the world’s largest independent music publishers, with 100 years of popular music history in its catalog. Carlin’s music and royalty management systems are highly automated, as you might expect. In terms of IT, Carlin gets by on more than just a song. It turns out that this company–with operations in the United States, Canada, France, Germany, and the United Kingdom–relies on Vision Solutions’ Vision Director software to maintain tempo. Vision Director is a set of utilities for proactively monitoring, managing, and optimizing IBM Power Systems i servers (including System i, iSeries,

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• SAP Says 2009 Ended Better Than Expected, Rejiggers Maintenance Fees

  January 18, 2010 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Enterprise application powerhouse SAP said last week after a preliminary review of its books that it would finish off 2009 a bit better than expected. Don’t get too excited. Just because business in Q4 was better than expected doesn’t mean it was great. And that’s why SAP also said that it was rejiggering its maintenance fees to reflect the new economic realities out there in the global economy. Based on U.S. accounting rules, SAP said its sales for software and related services in the fourth quarter ended December 31 would come in at €2.56 billion, down 4 percent from the

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• Consume an IWS Web Service From a VB.NET Client

  January 13, 2010 Michael Sansoterra

  Note: Source code for RPG program CustListR can be downloaded here. In my article Publish Result Sets Using Web Services and IWS, I demonstrated how to write an RPG program that can return a result set (i.e., multiple rows of data) to a Web service client using an Integrated Web Services (IWS) server instance. The benefit of using RPG to publish data as a Web service is that any number of clients can consume the Web service, regardless of OS platform or language. This potentially makes your i data and business logic accessible from anywhere! This tip will

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• Joining Incompatible Data

  January 13, 2010 Hey, Ted

  A physical file contains a nine-byte character acknowledgement number field that consists of a single letter followed by eight digits. I would like to change this field to two fields: a one-byte character and an eight-byte numeric field so that I could join the file to other files that have only the eight-digit numeric value. I realize that I could do a conversion to redefine the field, but that would require extensive changes to our applications. Is there an easier method to redefine the field, such as in a logical file? –David You probably don’t have to redefine the field,

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• FTPING i5/OS Files to a Unix Server

  January 13, 2010 Hey, Joe

  Can I use FTP to back-up i5/OS libraries to a Unix server? Management wants to save money by not purchasing an LTO 4 tape library. Instead, they want to use Unix boxes to store i5/OS back-ups, and later send the data to tape. I’ve tried FTPing files between i5/OS and UNIX, but I can’t read the data when it’s transferred back. How do I approach this? –Charlene The answers to your questions are “yes” and “no”. Yes, you should be able to easily back-up and save production libraries to a Unix box. No, automated back-up to a Unix box may

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• Bartell Launches RPGUI, an Open Source Web Enablement Framework for RPG

  January 12, 2010 Alex Woodie

  RPG expert Aaron Bartell is spearheading a new open source development project called RPGUI that aims to radically simplify the development of Web interfaces for RPG programs and programmers. The project is only about a month old, and there is a lot of work to do. But Bartell is very optimistic about RPGUI’s prospects for eliminating the need for RPG programmers to become experts in Web languages such as JavaScript, and to provide a “no brainer” low-cost option for keeping RPG applications looking modern. Like many RPG programmers, Bartell professes a love for the language and the overall simplicity of

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• Profound Goes GA with i OS-based Web Portal, Atrium

  January 12, 2010 Alex Woodie

  Profound Logic‘s Atrium is now in the building. Last week the i OS toolmaker announced the general availability of the new Web portal, which provides a single repository where users can access all of their Web-enabled or modernized green-screen i OS applications. The product, which was first introduced in early 2009 at the COMMON conference in Nevada, also gained new functionality from the beta release in the area of macros. Atrium is an i OS application portal that runs within a Web browser and provides centralized access to Web-enabled applications. The software is all about speed and safety: The

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• DRV Tech Automates i OS Message Notification with New Product

  January 12, 2010 Alex Woodie

  SpoolFlex developer DRV Technologies last week unveiled a new product designed to ensure that important i OS system messages get in front of the eyes of operators and administrators, through e-mail or messaging software on the Web or a smartphone. Just as the company’s flagship product, SpoolFlex, automates the distribution of spool files, the new MessageFlex product automates the distribution of errors and other messages generated by the system to help avoid downtime. MessageFlex monitors all i OS message queues for important messages, such as a failed backup or a problem with DASD. When an important message arrives, MessageFlex automatically

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• System i Developer Sets Date for Next RPG & DB2 Summit

  January 12, 2010 Dan Burger

  System i Developer Sets Date for Next RPG & DB2 Summit RPG is dead. Long live RPG. Repeat. Chug beer. Write more code. RPG is not going away anytime soon. The amount of RPG code running businesses, if laid end to end, would stretch from Earth to the farthest galaxy–give or take a few light years. Yes, some of that code is as old as the dinosaurs. So how does a 50-year-old programming language survive in a high tech world where most “innovations” have the staying power of a lit firecracker? Evolution. Those that don’t know RPG from TGIF have

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