• VACAVA’s Low-Code Approach To Modernization

  July 9, 2018 Alex Woodie

  IBM i shops have lots of options when it comes to application modernization. At one end of the spectrum are screen-scraper tools, which can provide a quick fix for shops tired with the 5250 interface. IBM i shops with more time, money, and inspiration may choose to completely rewrite their application on a new platform. Somewhere in between lies RapidBIZ, a low-code modernization affair from VACAVA.

  The folks at VACAVA knows a thing or two about the IBM i platform. For starters, the company is based in Rochester, Minnesota, home of the world-famous IBM lab where the AS/400 was created …

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• Guru: Speed Up Web Pages Using Apache’s mod_deflate

  July 9, 2018 Alan Seiden

  If your web applications run on HTTP Server (Powered by Apache) for i, you can enable a powerful Apache extension, mod_deflate, to speed up your site. Just as zipping up files on your PC saves space and accelerates file transfers, mod_deflate “allows output from your server to be compressed before being sent to the client over the network.” (See https://httpd.apache.org/docs/2.4/mod/mod_deflate.html for more information.) My tests show a speed improvement of 10 to 50 percent.

  You can compress any text-based output, including HTML (whether plain .html files, output from RPG CGI programs, PHP, or other languages), Cascading Style Sheets (CSS), …

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• Four Hundred Monitor, July 9

  July 9, 2018 Dan Burger

  Summer may be in full swing but the IT community has yet to go into vacation mode. There is still a lot of action happening around our industry, including new champions in the worlds of big and small supercomputing. The women of IT also continue to make their mark as we look at another profile of female leadership in computing, this time on IBM’s Summit project. Now is the time to start planning for those Fall conferences so be sure to take a look at our Calendar below for many opportunities for networking and continuing your IT education.

  Top Stories

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• IBM i PTF Guide, Volume 20, Number 26

  July 9, 2018 Doug Bidwell

  We are running the IBM i PTF Guide in the Monday edition of The Four Hundred this week, just to keep you on your toes during our summer holiday schedule. There was a lot of stuff going on even with the July 4 holiday in the United States impending before we went to press.

  This week we have new Groups for HIPER and Java, and, a new version of QMGTOOLS, for all three releases. The Java groups for each release have significant vulnerabilities. The fixes are included in the latest Java group for each release:

  • Release 7.3 – SF99725 level

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• Lamps Plus Sheds Light On Modernization Integration

  June 25, 2018 Dan Burger

  Discussions about modernization continue to tie top management in knots. Questions about the time, the effort, and the risks to the business are difficult to answer with precision, so organizations habitually focus on obstacles rather than opportunities.

  “If you stay in that mindset, you will never move,” says Derrick Lindsey, a modernization project lead at Lamps Plus, the nation’s largest specialty lighting retailer and a leading manufacturer of lighting and home furnishings. “There’s a lot less risk in modernizing existing applications on the IBM i than migrating off of the IBM i platform to other platforms such as Unix, Linux, …

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• Trinity Guard Gives Audit Tool A Friendly GUI

  June 25, 2018 Alex Woodie

  IT professionals who are tired of using 5250 greenscreens to manually conduct regulatory audits of their IBM i systems may be interested in a colorful piece of software from Trinity Guard. The company recently launched TGCentral, which is a unified HTML interface designed to simplify the configuration and execution of security and regulatory audits across multiple IBM i servers.

  As the spiritual and intellectual successor to PentaSafe, Trinity Guard understands how beloved those old PentaSafe products were. Even though NetIQ/Attachmate/Micro Focus has not added any new features to its IBM i security suite for over a decade, there were …

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• Guru: Table Value Constructors Build Tables On The Fly

  June 25, 2018 Ted Holt

  Because I wish to be as valuable and productive as possible to the people who pay me to program their computers, I continually search the Web for new ideas and techniques. Doing so often leads me to sites that cater to other computing platforms. Today I want to share with you some SQL techniques that I learned from Microsoft SQL Server professionals.

  These techniques are based on the Table Value Constructor (TVC), which is a group of data values, usually literals, organized into rows and columns. In its simplest form, a table value constructor is literal tabular data that is …

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• A Better Way To Skin The IBM i Cloud Cat

  June 25, 2018 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  It may come as a surprise, but many IBM i resellers and distributors with aspirations of providing true cloud-style Power Systems iron running IBM i and its predecessor operating systems are just as disappointed in Big Blue’s pricing and packaging practices as customers themselves. More than a few IBM i customers, and indeed some OS/400 V5R3 and i5/OS V5R4 customers, sorely wish there was a way to buy capacity on Power Systems that looked and smelled and tasted more like what Amazon Web Services and a zillion other service providers offer for X86 iron running Windows Server or Linux.

  Jim …

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• IT Spending To Boom In 2018, Tails Off In 2019

  June 25, 2018 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  It is hard to say what is the cart and what is the horse in the elements that make up an economy. Our sense of how well or poorly the economy is doing actually affects how we react and therefore how we actually spend on goods and services, and therefore there is always an element of self-fulfilling prophecy mixed in with the underlying fundamentals. It is hard to predict what an economy is going to do, much less 185 different ones that are interconnected on planet Earth, and it is even harder, perhaps, to reckon what one aspect of those …

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• A Platform Of A Certain Age And Respectability

  June 20, 2018 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Outliving your enemies is one of the best kinds of revenge, if you happen to have any enemies. But the people of Rochester, Minnesota, did not really have many enemies, although they did build a system that has outlived its many rivals and that continues to co-exist alongside newer platforms that are, quite frankly, still difficult and expensive to use.

  That the AS/400 is celebrating its 30th birthday this week, and the IBM i platform running on Power Systems is still around and still a viable business, is nothing short of remarkable. We know this because we just remarked upon …

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