• Reader Feedback on AS/400: Still Kicking After 21 Years

  June 29, 2009 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  I wasn’t alone in my gratitude and slight melancholy as the summer solstice came around on the guitar again, reminding me of the AS/400’s 21st birthday. A bunch of you had some thoughts about this and my suggestion that we need an official AS/400 Advocate to argue the case for the Power Systems i platform. I thought I would share some of the emails I got from readers. –TPM I, too, am an oldster, having started on a System/36 and upgrading to the B40 AS/400 as it was called then. As an amateur photographer, may I respectfully suggest you get

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• IBM to Resurrect Just-Killed Power Systems Rebate Deal?

  June 29, 2009 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  It’s back. . . . Well, I think it is, anyway. A long-running rebate deal that IBM has offered in one shape or form or another for the past zillion years, and which was withdrawn from the Power Systems catalog in May, is apparently being reintroduced. Stephanie Carmel, worldwide vice president for ISV solutions at IBM, was speaking on a Webcast hosted by Power Systems i disaster recovery and high availability software maker Vision Solutions, and she said that IBM would be announcing in June a new Power Systems rebate offer that will give customers rebates on Power Systems

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• PHP Application Vendors Gearing Up for Smart Cube Appliances

  June 29, 2009 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  As The Four Hundred reported a month ago when the Smart Cube i and Linux appliance servers and their related Smart Market were launched in the United States, Zend Technologies Zend Core PHP engine is bundled on these boxes so ISVs can deploy PHP-based applications on the i or Linux boxes or front ends for RPG applications that are redone in PHP on the i versions of the machine. The question now is this: Are the PHP application vendors going to jump through the hoops and get their applications certified to play nice with the automation embodied in the Smart

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• The Economy Gives Oracle a Slight Haircut

  June 29, 2009 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  The continuing lethargy in the global economy put pressure on revenues and profits at software giant and perhaps soon hardware vendor Oracle in its latest quarter, but the numbers are not as bad as some IT vendors have shown. That is for sure, and a testament to the mini-monopolies that Oracle has been able to build for itself over the years. In the fourth quarter of fiscal 2009 ended May 31, Oracle’s revenues were $6.86 billion, down 5 percent from the year-ago period. Not surprisingly, new software license sales in the quarter fell by 13 percent to $2.74 billion, but

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• Dumb Behavior Spreads as Smart Devices Proliferate

  June 29, 2009 Alex Woodie

  Do you think it’s appropriate to use your Blackberry in a toilet stall? Or to send a tweet from your mobile phone while attending a funeral service? Your mother probably never taught you that these specific activities were naughty because they didn’t even exist 10 years ago. Unfortunately, common sense apparently hasn’t stopped Americans from practicing poor etiquette with their new-fangled smart devices. And according to a new Harris Interactive survey, most of us are tired of it already. Harris Interactive conducted a “Mobile Etiquette” survey in April to see where people stand on their acceptance of public use of

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• V6R1 Run SQL Scripts: Print and Save Result Sets

  June 24, 2009 Skip Marchesani

  The ability to print a Run SQL Scripts result set and/or save it in Excel spreadsheet format has been on my wish list and that of others for a long time. V6R1 has fulfilled these wishes and by doing so has made Run SQL Scripts more functional and easier to use. Print capability is now a standard function when a result set is displayed. However the Run SQL Scripts option to “Allow Save Results” must be selected to be able to save a result set in Excel or other file format. To select this option, click on Options in the

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• No More Global Variables!

  June 24, 2009 Ted Holt

  Last December, I shared four ways to avoid problems caused by the use of global data in RPG programs. I mentioned that a discussion of i 6.1 (or as I call it, V6R1) data-localization features would have to wait for another day. Well, that day is here. With V6R1, it is possible to write programs that have no global identifiers. (By identifiers, I mean variables and constants. By variables, I not only mean scalar variables, but also arrays and data structures.) You only need to change two programming practices. First, lose the RPG cycle. It breaks my

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• Reader Input: /QOpenSys Redux, PC5250 Popup Keypads, and Even Farther Beyond Replication

  June 24, 2009 Hey, Joe

  It looks like the links that you detailed in the Matryoshka Doll article on nested QOpenSys links probably occur after installing PASE on the iSeries. Check out this IBM document that very briefly discusses recursive /QOpenSys links in the AS/400 IFS. IBM doesn’t say why this happens, but at least it points the finger at what causes the problem. –Bill Speicher Earlier this year I wrote this article and a tip on one of the great mysteries of the AS/400 Integrated File System (AS/400 IFS). The purpose of the article was to explain why there are multiple /QOpenSys symbolic

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• IBM to Offer Free EGL Tool for Web 2.0

  June 23, 2009 Alex Woodie

  “Free” is not typically a word that’s associated with IBM, especially when it comes to System i and System z programming tools, which can carry seven- or eight-figure price tags for the biggest customers. But Big Blue is making a big gamble that a free version of its EGL tool for creating Web 2.0 applications, tentatively named EGL Community Edition, will pay off in the long run by establishing a large community of users who are familiar with EGL, and provide an alternative to PHP and Ruby on Rails. IBM announced plans to deliver a free, unsupported version of

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• Infor Spurs Customer Upgrades with ‘Flex’ Incentives

  June 23, 2009 Alex Woodie

  Infor yesterday unveiled a new program that seeks to make it easier and less expensive for customers to upgrade to the latest release of their software, or to migrate to the latest release of an equivalent Infor product. The program, called Infor Flex, is aimed at addressing a problem faced by Infor, along with its big ERP competitors: The fact that many customers are running on very old releases of software, and have no easy way to get current without incurring lots of risk and big fees. Flex addresses those pain points, Infor says. Infor succeeded in becoming one of

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