• IBM i Open Source Business Architect Lays Out A Plan

  January 18, 2017 Dan Burger

  Enterprise level application development is no place for open source languages. Can you believe it? That was once the widely accepted truth. Jiminy Crickets! Things have changed. The number of the stable open source distributions available with comprehensive support and maintenance goes well beyond common knowledge. Industry giants, successful SMB players, and mom and pop businesses are finding good reasons to use open source. Even IBM uses open source for internal business reasons.

  There are reasons for you to do the same.

  Before you recoil and brace for a “mind your own business and I’ll mind mine” retaliation against open …

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• Happy Holidays And Big Changes Ahead For IT Jungle In 2017

  December 14, 2016 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  If you can say one thing about the AS/400 through IBM i community, it is one that demonstrates the longevity of ideas that are ahead of their time. IT Jungle, which has been publishing since July 2001, is one of the whippersnappers in this market, although The Four Hundred in various forms has been publishing since July 1989. And still, we are young. It is with this long history in mind, which is so much shorter than the System/3 machines that came out in 1969, when many of us here at IT Jungle were either unborn or (comically) had

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• Mad Dog 21/21: Ginni And The Jinns

  December 14, 2016 Hesh Wiener

  Did you ever have a run of terrible luck, when just about everything seemed to be going awry? You might be somebody who shrugs off mud spatters of misfortune. If so, you wouldn’t be Salman Rushdie, who has composed a whole world in which imps, the kind called jinns in Islamic mythology, pop up all over the place causing havoc and misery. His novel Two Years contains such a world, one that coincidentally might seem familiar to Virginia Rometty, whose spell at the helm of IBM has been marred by mayhem. Perhaps the jinns are picking on Ginni. In

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• Rocket Adds IBM i Support to Backup Reporting Tool

  December 14, 2016 Alex Woodie

  IBM i shops that find it difficult to track the state of their backups across IBM and non IBM platforms may want to check out the latest product news from Rocket Software. Last week the company announced that its Servergraph Professional product now supports IBM i, thereby enabling customers to view BRMS backup status alongside that of other backup tools, like NetBackup and TSM. Considering the amount of data stored by the average enterprise these days, it’s clear that backup has transformed into a major application workload in its own right. Ensuring the integrity of backups has always been

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• IBM i Modernization Gets a Newlook Accelerator

  December 14, 2016 Dan Burger

  Legacy applications tend to outlive the predictions of their imminent demise. The trouble they cause can be costly, though, as maintenance and vanishing skills for out-of-date programming languages are problems. Modernizing applications remains a priority in many IBM midrange shops, where reuse of existing IBM i 5250 screens and RPG (and COBOL) code is being closely examined. Tools like Accelerator from Surround Technologies and Newlook from Looksoftware are getting attention, too. The latest collaboration from these two software vendors results in the generation of an IBM i-based user interface that’s accessible from any desktop or mobile device with a browser.

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• The IBM i Year In Review

  December 14, 2016 Alex Woodie

  With another year almost in the books for the IBM i community, we thought it was time to reminisce on the top stories of 2016. Security vulnerabilities, hacked AS/400s, blockbuster acquisitions, new releases of the operating system, and major conferences all garnered their share of digital ink. Here’s a rundown on the top IBM i-related stories making news this year. It started innocently enough, way back in. . . January . . .When we asked “what should you do with your spare CPWs?” After all, you can’t take ’em with you. But with so much processing oomph on those brawny

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• How Do You Do That with RDi? Part 2: Compile

  December 13, 2016 Susan Gantner

  In an earlier tip, I began a series on how I do things using RDi that some people seem to prefer doing in PDM. In that first tip, I talked about various ways to copy a source member. In this tip, I’ll talk about compiling with RDi. I must confess to being baffled by the number of people I talk to who, while they do all their editing in RDi, always go back to PDM to do their compiles. To me, if you don’t compile your code with RDi, you’re missing out on a huge time-saver: the ability to

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• RPG And The BLOB

  December 13, 2016 Hey, Mike

  I’m trying to use a SELECT/INTO embedded SQL statement in an RPG program that accesses a table that includes a BLOB(20K) column. The INTO target is an externally defined data structure based on the table. However, I get compiler errors unless I remove the BLOB column from the table. What’s up with that? —Four Hundred Guru reader The problem is that RPG doesn’t have a native data type equivalent of a BLOB (or the other large object types CLOB/DBCLOB, for that matter.) The reason for this is that large object types can be up to 2GB in size, far

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• IT Spending And Staffing Show The Effects Of Managed Services

  December 12, 2016 Dan Burger

  Last week, an email from Computer Economics advised me of an updated report on IT spending and staffing. CE has cranked out these reports on an annual basis for many years, which is useful for long-term comparisons. These days, however, the short-term comparisons are almost microscopic. There are times when it is wise to expect the unexpected, but this isn’t one of them. IT spending and hiring leaves a faint mark on the chart that maps business growth. The indistinct spending growth that is revealed in the CE report, indicates cloud computing has the best potential for “long-term growth and

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• As I See It: History Repeating

  December 12, 2016 Victor Rozek

  It was a known problem 16 years ago. And for 16 years it was largely ignored, even though it poses a direct threat to representative democracy. It is a problem well understood by IT professionals and cyber security experts, and it haunts the entire spectrum of computer-dependent users from the military and political establishment, to corporations and the public. It was the subject of debate, accusation, and investigation during the recent election, and it has the power to cast doubt on its legitimacy. The problem: Through neglect or deliberate intent, computers that decide elections have been allowed to remain vulnerable

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