The IT Jungle

Mad Dog 21/21: It’s The Apps, Stupid

December 8, 2014 Hesh Wiener

IBM and Apple are best friends these days. They are working together to get businesses to provide their employees with iPads and iPhones along with IBM tablet applications and cloud services. IBM is going to do the marketing, including the sale or leasing of mobile devices to its end users. Support will be more complicated. Apple will serve as the primary outside support provider through its remote-only AppleCare service; IBM will be the onsite support provider. It isn’t clear what role will be played by the teams that currently support users’ computers, which usually run Windows.

There is little

Critical Times, Critical Skills

December 8, 2014 Dan Burger

IBM i shops are better equipped to performance tune their infrastructure than they are to performance tune their IT workforce. On first glance, that may not raise many eyebrows. But the fact is that relatively few IBM i shops performance tune their infrastructure. What’s that tell you about their investments in training and education? There’s something stopping companies from making investments in skilled workers.

Last week I had a conversation with Jon Paris and Susan Gantner. They spend more than 300 days a year training IBM i programmers. That connects them with the minority of IBM i shops that are

2014: The IBM i Year That Was

December 8, 2014 Alex Woodie

My, what a year it has been. Seems like only yesterday we were chatting up what 2014 would bring, and now before we know it, it’s already passed by. From IBM‘s new chips and its old chip business to security hacks and vendor consolidation, it was a fairly eventful year. Here’s a look at the IBM i news highlights from 2014.

Arguably, the highlight of the year from an IBM i news perspective was IBM’s launch of the Power8 processor. It’s always exciting seeing what IBM’s chip experts do with the next generation of the Power architecture, and they

Entry Power8 Systems Get Express Pricing, Fat Memory

December 8, 2014 Timothy Prickett Morgan

The systems that IBM uses to make its product announcements like to play a bit of cat and mouse with all of us, and those of you who know me know that I check the system religiously to see if anything interesting has come out. Before the Thanksgiving Day holiday, Big Blue did make a bunch of IBM i-related announcements, but they did not show up on my account until after we had already put the December 1 edition of The Four Hundred to bed.

The important thing is that IBM has finally gotten around to providing Express Edition pricing

UPDATED: Content Manager OnDemand for i Lives On!

December 3, 2014 Alex Woodie

Editor’s note: This story, which was originally published under the headline “Content Manager OnDemand For i Withdrawn In 2016,” has been updated. Content Manager OnDemand for i continues to be developed and supported by IBM. “It is alive and well,” Tim Rowe, the business architect for application development and systems management for IBM i at the IBM lab in Rochester, Minnesota, told IT Jungle on December 3. Apparently, the IBM withdrawal announcement should only have been about withdrawing CMOD for Multiplatforms version 8.5, but for some reason the entire CMOD for i product was also listed as being sent out

Admin Alert: What Should An IBM i Administrator Do, Part 1

December 3, 2014 Joe Hertvik

With remote monitoring and lights-out data centers, people think there isn’t a need for system operators any more. And they’re right-ish. There’s little need for low-skill operators whose main function is watching the system and printing reports. But IBM i operations work isn’t obsolete; it’s just changed into a systems management function. Given that, here’s my take on tasks a lower level IBM i system administrator can perform in 2015 and beyond.

Why You Need Day-To-Day IBM i Administrators

For IBM i shops, it’s important to define the difference between project management and day-to-day operations. IBM i project managers are

TR8 DB2 For i Enhancements, Part 2

December 3, 2014 Michael Sansoterra

In the first part of this series, I introduced several of the DB2 for i enhancements made in IBM i 7.1 Technology refresh 8 (and in IBM i 7.2).

These enhancements were of interest to developers and administrators. Likewise, this second set of enhancements we are about to review will be of interest to developers but may hold even greater interest for those in an administrative role.

QSYS2.GET_JOB_INFO enhancement

This DB2 for i service table function has two new enhancements:

1. The job parameter now accepts the special value ‘*’ to return information about the current job.

2. New

Fuzzy Matching In RPG

December 3, 2014 Ted Holt

Note: The code accompanying this article is available for download here.

SQL allows you to use wildcard characters with the LIKE operator to search a column for a pattern. As they say in the GEICO commercials, “Everybody knows that.” Well, did you know you can do the same thing in RPG programs?

If you’re not familiar with LIKE, read about it here. You can use the LIKE operator to find data with inexact matches. For instance, find all customers whose names contain “ACME”.

select * from cust
 where name like '%ACME%'

   ID  NAME
=====  ==========================================
19883  ACME

Web Dev Tool from mrc Goes ‘Responsive’

December 2, 2014 Alex Woodie

In response to a “fundamental shift” in Web application development, mrc is modifying its development tools with “responsive design” elements to ensure that the user interfaces it generates will display correctly, no matter what device they’re viewed on.

When it comes to enterprise application development, the Web has won the war, and developers today have a plethora of tools at their disposal to build compelling Web-based applications. Even IBM i developers are getting in on the act and developing cutting-edge Web apps, thanks to technologies like PHP, JavaScript, and Node.JS, which IBM is adding to the platform.

Independent software

IBM i Shops Climb Into the VAULT

December 2, 2014 Alex Woodie

United Computer Group has landed two new customers for VAULT400, its hosted offering for IBM i backups and disaster recovery as a service. The new customers include R.W. Sidley of Ohio and Mid-America Door of Oklahoma.

R.W. Sidley has been a UCG customer for more than 20 years and recently included backup as a service (BaaS) using VAULT400. The company, which supplies ready-mix concrete among other construction materials, decided to bolster the security of its IBM i-resident data by utilizing the VAULT400 service to house backups.

Instead of handling the backups manually, the company uses VAULT400 to automatically process the

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