• Thinking In Pointers

  September 11, 2013 Ted Holt

  Suppose you were to ask me how large an alphanumeric variable should be, and I replied that I didn’t know, nor did I care. Wouldn’t that sound odd? Those of us who have been programming in business languages such as RPG, COBOL, and CL since the French and Indian War always think it’s important to know the size of a variable, otherwise we won’t be able to define it properly in a program. But when you work with pointers, a variable’s defined size doesn’t necessarily matter. Let me show you what I’m talking about. Consider a command: CMD PROMPT('Do something')

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• Retrieve The Call Stack In DB2 For i

  September 11, 2013 Michael Sansoterra

  Note: The document accompanying this article is available for download here. Troubleshooting problems is often a costly component of application maintenance. Consider the case when the user reports an application crash. Exactly what program crashed? Was it the UI logic or business logic embedded in a service program? If it was a service program, what procedure was running? What was the chain of events that led to the problem? Knowing what the call stack looks like can help answer many of these questions, thereby reducing costly investigation time. Since writing “persistent stored modules” (a.k.a., SQL routines) is increasingly popular

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• Kisco Unveils the Newly Renamed iFileUtility

  September 10, 2013 Alex Woodie

  It’s already been five years since the last major name change of the platform formerly known as AS/400. Just the same, there are still a lot of products out there that have some variation of ‘400 in the name (including, ahem, some IT Jungle products). One product vendor that’s been working to clean its lineup of the ‘400 name is Kisco Information Systems, which recently unveiled iFileUtility. iFileUtility is a native green-screen tool used to browse and maintain IBM i databases. The product enables users to view and update single records, or view and update groups of records simultaneously.

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• User Defined Dashboards Now Shipping from mrc

  September 10, 2013 Alex Woodie

  Earlier this year, mrc announced a feature of its m-Power development environment called user defined dashboards that puts more power in the hands of users. The product, it turns out, wasn’t quite fully baked. But now, we’re told, it’s ready to roll. User defined dashboards are designed to enable users to pick and choose what graphical elements (such as charts, graphs, and tables) they will see on their dashboards and also where they are placed on the screen. After selecting the screen elements required for, say, a sales dashboard, the users save their work. The users can then access the

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• Infor Delivers Better ERP Hooks Into Salesforce.com

  September 10, 2013 Alex Woodie

  Infor customers can now feed data from multiple, disparate ERP systems or even multiple divisions of the company into their Salesforce.com implementation using its latest Inforce connector, the company announced in August. Inforce is a collection of software as a service (SaaS) offerings that automatically populate data from Infor’s back-end ERP and financial systems into the front-end Salesforce.com CRM offering. The first Inforce offering for sales professional debuted in early 2012, and was followed up with two more, for marketing and customer service disciplines. Inforce’s new multi-ERP and multi-company capabilities will enable larger organizations to take advantage of the solution.

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• Qualcomm Sells Omnitracs for $800 Million

  September 10, 2013 Alex Woodie

  Qualcomm last month sold Omnitracs, its division that develops truck- and trailer-tracking technology that was often integrated with carriers’ dispatching applications running on IBM i servers, to a private equity group for $800 million. Long before CDMA or the Snapdragon processors were a gleam in Irwin Jacobs’ eye, Qualcomm was–if you can believe it–a mainstay in the rough and tumble world of interstate trucking. The tale starts in the glorious year of 1988, when the San Diego, California, company started developing the Omnitracs systems that would combine cellular, satellite, and IBM midrange technology to track and monitor trucks and trailers

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• IBM Revs Cloud-Based Social Business Suite

  September 10, 2013 Alex Woodie

  IBM has issued a new release of SmartCloud for Social Business (SC4SB), a collection of cloud-based utilities that allow users to collaborate online via email, instant messaging, file sharing, and more. SC4SB is an IBM-hosted offering that provides users with email, calendar, instant messaging file sharing, forums, and Web meeting functionality from the comfort of a Web browser or an IBM Notes client. IBM rolled out the SC4SB offerings (which previously went by the name LotusLive) in January 2012. IBM sells various bundles and stand-alone services as part of the SC4SB suite. These bundles include: the entry-level SmartCloud Connections

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• BlueWare CEO Arrested in Alleged Kickback Scheme

  September 10, 2013 Alex Woodie

  The CEO of BlueWare, a developer of IBM i-based healthcare management applications, was arrested in Florida last month for her alleged role in a kickback scheme with an elected official and a lobbyist, who were also arrested. The CEO, Rose Harr, posted bail and denies all the charges. Harr is accused of funneling money into the 2012 re-election campaign of Mitch Needelman, who was then the Brevard County Clerk of Court, in exchange for Needelman’s assistance in arranging for BlueWare to receive an $8.5 million contract from the county to scan a gymnasium full of paper documents into digital records.

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• Linoma Adds Clustering, Disk Throttling to MFT Products

  September 10, 2013 Alex Woodie

  Organizations that have no tolerance for downtime with their file transfer activities may want to take a look at the latest release of Linoma Software‘s GoAnywhere Director software, which gains support for clustering. The company also issued a new release of its GoAnywhere Services software that allows administrators to limit how much storage and network bandwidth users of the product can consume. Support for “active-active” clustering in version 4.5 puts another feather in the cap of GoAnyhere Director, the most feature-rich member of Linoma’s MFT suite. With this capability, multiple installations of GoAnywhere Director can work together to execute

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• RTC Now Lets You Simulate IBM i Dependency Builds on Windows

  September 10, 2013 Alex Woodie

  IBM i and z/OS shops that use IBM‘s Rational Team Concert (RTC) software to manage their development processes will get a new “simulation mode” that allows time-saving dependency builds to run on any platform, including Windows. The new feature is included in the latest release of RTC, version 4.0.4, which shipped in late August. The new functionality will allow users to run a simulated dependency build for IBM i and z/OS applications on any platform, including Windows, IBM says. “This makes it possible to create all the dependency metadata [build maps and so on] of a build without running

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