• Latest IBM i TRs To Ship Next Month

  August 15, 2018 Alex Woodie

  IBM unveiled a pair of out-of-bound technology refreshes (TRs) for the IBM i operating system last week. In addition to supporting the new Power Systems E980 server, IBM i 7.3 TR5 and 7.2 TR9 bring a set of enhancements to the platform’s database, development tools, and the administrative interface.

  The IBM i installed base has grown accustomed to seeing operating system updates in the spring and the fall. This twice-a-year pattern has been with us, more or less, since IBM shifted to the TR approach several years ago. But IBM broke with that tradition last week when it announced that …

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• Q&A With IBM i’s AppDev Architect

  June 18, 2018 Alex Woodie

  During COMMON’s recent POWERUp18 conference in San Antonio, Texas, IT Jungle got a chance to sit down with Tim Rowe, the IBM i business architect for application development and systems management at IBM, to talk about what’s going on with application development on the platform. Here’s an edited version of that conversation.

  IT Jungle: So what’s happening in IBM i application development? What’s new up there in Rochester?

  Tim Rowe: In between all sorts of fun development stuff that we got going on back in the lab, I spend quite a bit of time talking with customers. We continue to …

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• The Five Hottest IBM i RFEs Of The Quarter

  April 2, 2018 Alex Woodie

  You should know by now that IBM wants your input on new features for IBM i. Anybody with a valid IBM ID can submit their ideas – anything, really – through the new Request for Enhancement (RFE) process it put in place over a year ago. Now that the first quarter of 2018 is officially in the books, it’s a good time to check in with the RFE submissions and see kind of new stuff IBM i users have dreamt up to enhance the midrange server platform at the center of this community.

  Here are the top five new RFEs, …

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• Tooling Around With IBM i Access Client Solutions Announcements

  February 21, 2018 Dan Burger

  Access Client Solutions (ACS) received several feature/function enhancements when the Technology Refreshes were announced last week with a little something for end users, system administrators, and database engineers. Although nothing stands out as a major item, this is an incremental release fulfilling user-requested features.

  The 5250 emulator is a good example. It’s a key technology that is likely the most used component in ACS, but it’s been around for so long it’s easy to think there’s nothing new in emulation. But users never seem to cease to ask for something new: support for Chinese CCSID 1371 is one of those …

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• New IBM i Technology Refreshes Announced; Available Mid-March

  February 14, 2018 Dan Burger

  IBM yesterday announced that Technology Refresh 8 (TR8) for IBM i 7.2 and TR4 for IBM i 7.3 will provide support for Power9 hardware, enhancements for RPG, security enhancements, and a variety of new capabilities for licensed products. The support for Power9 will be covered elsewhere in this issue of The Four Hundred. Here, we’ll provide an overview of the IBM i operating system, licensed programs, and software.

  When TR enhancements include RPG, I like to begin there. Application developers using Rational Development Studio should take note of the new operation code referred to as DATA-INTO, which adds the …

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• IBM Teaches ACS New Tricks

  November 8, 2017 Alex Woodie

  Last month’s Technology Refreshes for IBM i 7.2 and 7.3 brought a number of enhancements to the operating system and the database. But one should not overlook the new stuff coming to IBM i Access Client Solutions (ACS), including changes to the 5250 emulator, extensions for database access, and security enhancements.

  ACS, in case you forgot, is the new go-to client interface that administrators, developers, engineers, and power users alike can use for handling a range of IBM i tasks. The Java-based product, which IBM unveiled back in August 2012, bundles a bunch of useful goodies into a single product, …

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• Guru: Consuming A REST Web Service Using SQL And POST

  October 2, 2017 Mike Larsen

  In my prior article, I showed how to consume a REST web service using the GET verb. This time, we’re going to continue to build our knowledge of web services by working with the POST verb. In addition to working with a different verb, I’m also going to demonstrate how to pass a header and body to the service.

  The goal is to post information to an Amazon Web Service (AWS). I created a simple REST Amazon Web Service that accepts information about a pet which will be inserted into a pet store database. I pass a JSON structure …

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• More Database Tools Highlight Latest IBM i Access Client

  September 18, 2017 Dan Burger

  Remember IBM i Access for Windows? Many IBM i advocates do because they never stopped using it, despite its replacement by IBM i Access Client Solutions more than four years ago. Access for Windows hasn’t seen an enhancement since ACS arrived and ACS is on a continual enhancement schedule. The most recent round of upgrades arrived in mid-July without much fanfare, which is the way IBM seems to prefer.

  SQL developers and database engineers (those that have the title and those that only have the responsibility) are among the professionals benefiting the most from the expanding ACS toolset that usually …

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• Top Ten New IBM i RFEs

  May 22, 2017 Alex Woodie

  Should IBM open source its database drivers, or add support for .NET? Should it add the latest SSL ciphers to IBM i 7.1? These are some of the changes that it has received through its new Web-based requests for enhancement (RFE) program on its developerWorks site.

  The new RFE functionality is only a few months old, but it’s already attracting the attention of IBM i professionals who want IBM to change things about the stack. It’s also getting attention from other IBM i pros who get to vote on them.

  Here are the top ten RFEs so far, ranked by …

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• Guru: SQL Table Functions Can Do Non-function Things

  May 1, 2017 Ted Holt

  We IBM i developers owe a great debt to Scott Forstie. He’s responsible for the wonderful DB2 for i Services and IBM i Services, which give us SQL interfaces for many functions of the operating system. Like IBM, we can write SQL interfaces to help us with non-database tasks. I recently did exactly that.

  While I can’t say that I never use the Start SQL Interactive Session (STRSQL) command, I can say that I prefer to use GUI SQL clients, in particular the Run SQL Scripts utility that is part of IBM i Access Client Solutions (ACS). I do get …

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