• HiT Touts Real World Work of IBM i Data Provider

  March 10, 2009 Alex Woodie

  Looking to avoid the time and expense of connecting System i and Windows .NET systems by hand, two System i shops in the transportation business, Seaboard Marine and Morgan Corporation, have utilized a HiT Software data provider called Ritmo to do the heavy lifting for them, the software company announced last week. It can be a tricky thing to write and debug a Windows .NET application that utilizes DB2 for i (DB2/400) data, according to HiT Software. Unless you have oodles of System i database experience and plenty of time allotted to the exercise, it can end up consuming more

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• New Tip Sheet for RDE and WDSc Programmers Arrives

  March 10, 2009 Dan Burger

  An expanded version of tips and techniques for users of IBM‘s Remote System Explorer (RSE) and WebSphere Development Studio (WDSc) is available from System i Developer (SiD), the group of IBM i development experts who are also the organizers of the RPG & DB2 Summit. The quick reference guide, Favorite Keyboard Shortcuts for RSE (WDSC/RDi), contains 46 keyboard shortcuts and presents them on a single page. The flip side includes tips on customizing RSE that improve productivity. All of the shortcuts and tips work with Version 7 of RSE in both WDSc and the RDi development environment. System

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• PlanetJ Gives WOW an AJAX Refresh

  March 10, 2009 Alex Woodie

  PlanetJ recently updated its Web Object Wizard (WOW) product line, which can Web-enable a 5250 application in as little as four minutes, the company claims. With WOW version 6.5.05, customers will find new AJAX-style user interface features, in addition to several enhancements and fixes. PlanetJ built WOW to be a flexible framework for quickly creating Web applications on the System i server. The Java-based development tool suite allows users to tap into existing RPG, COBOL, or CL functionality by generating SQL for accessing DB2/400. It also generates HTML and CSS to present the data in a Web browser. With WOW

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• Tolly Report Shows Reflection 2008 Outperforms Competitors, Attachmate Says

  March 10, 2009 Alex Woodie

  Attachmate recently commissioned The Tolly Group to see how its Reflection 2008 emulation suite stacks up to three big competitors. According to Tolly’s results, the former WRQ product delivered a broader feature set, better administrative functions, closer integration with Windows Vista and Office 2007, and overall better user productivity than the competing programs. Reflection 2008, which became generally available in January, is Attachmate’s flagship emulator and the preferred migration destination for its EXTRA! and InfoConnect emulator lines. It’s no surprise, then, that Attachmate paid Tolly last year to test Reflection 2008 against three other emulation suites–including IBM Personal Communications

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• Getting Dizzy from Dynamic Infrastructure

  March 9, 2009 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  When the economy went into recession in December 2007, and maybe even before, the top research and marketing minds at IBM were already hard at work on a new, big sales pitch that just so happens to coincide with the kinds of economic stimulus and long-term investments that the Obama Administration here in the United States and leaders in other governments want to make. What they want, of course, is a new and potentially much larger wave of automation, which has implications for our lives as well as our data centers. IBM’s top brass, starting with president, chief executive officer,

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• The Economy Gives the Server Biz a Flat Tire in Q4

  March 9, 2009 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  If IT departments are not being given the green light to attack the backlog of application development and infrastructure modernization projects they have on their to-do lists, the one thing they most definitely do not do is buy new server capacity. And that is why the fourth quarter, according to the analysts at Gartner, was not a particularly good one for server makers. Thankfully for them, though, a lot of projects are already funded and there is always basic capacity requirements driving some sales. Gartner figures that in the fourth quarter, server makers were able to push out 2.14

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• Infor Battles Customers in Court Over License Fees

  March 9, 2009 Alex Woodie

  ERP software giant Infor is taking legal action against customers as it seeks to recoup license fees it claims it is owed. The company reached an out-of-court settlement last week with a BPCS customer, Vaughan & Bushnell, regarding a dispute over an AS/400 upgrade performed in the 1990s. While the parties avoided a trial, Infor is still pursuing similar lawsuits against two other customers for license fees it claims the companies avoided paying following server upgrades. The terms of the settlement between Infor and Vaughan & Bushnell, a tool manufacturer based in Hebron, Illinois, that has used BPCS since 1987,

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• As I See It: Isolation

  March 9, 2009 Victor Rozek

  During the Great Depression, it was common that people greeted each other with a question. In shops, bars, and on the street, anxious men glanced self-consciously at one another and asked the only question that mattered: “Are you working?” Absent a social safety net, work was everything. It staved off hunger and the specter of bread lines and tent cites. It provided today’s security and tomorrow’s dignity; and made you the object of envy among the unemployed. For women, it was different, albeit no less painful. Some found jobs for starvation wages; many weren’t expected to work outside the home;

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• Global IT Spending Barely Ahead of 2008; Some Regions Showing Strength

  March 9, 2009 Dan Burger

  The supply of data keeps piling up. The demand for getting a better handle on that data keeps growing. But the money to convert those mountains of information into a better business strategy is being pulled back. Some organizations may be spending now to be in better shape when the economy starts to warm, but apparently many are keeping their hands in their pockets, particularly in the United States and Western Europe, spending only what they absolutely have to. IDC, in its most recent forecast, trimmed its worldwide IT spending estimate for 2009 to just 0.5 percent growth compared

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• Have IT Vendors Been Hit Harder Than IT Departments?

  March 9, 2009 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  I don’t know about you, but I keep wondering where the disconnect is between the U.S. unemployment rate and IT departments. And if there is a disconnect, as there seems to be from looking at the data, I am grateful on both your behalf and my own. The rest of the IT Jungle team is grateful, too. None of us–you, me, and them–wants to become a statistic. Here’s what I am talking about. Last Friday, the U.S. Labor Department’s Bureau of Labor Statistics did its monthly report on employment (or lack thereof) in America, and the news was not good.

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