• Guru: Open Access To The Rescue

  February 11, 2019 Jon Paris

  Recently I came upon a couple of questions on internet lists asking for an easy method to create flat files in the IFS. Not CSV files, but rather simple text files where individual data items are in fixed character positions. Various somewhat convoluted solutions were offered to the requestors, but to me this problem shouted “Open Access!”

  So, I set about quickly building an Open Access (OA) handler to perform the task. I find OA really useful for this kind of job because, once the handler is written, creating these kinds of files in the future become a trivial task, …

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• Taking A Fresche Approach To IBM i-Watson Education

  February 4, 2019 Alex Woodie

  There is a big data analytics revolution taking place that threatens to separate the AI haves from the have-nots. Companies that run the IBM i server want to get in on the analytics action just like everybody else, but AI discussions often stray away from IBM i. Now Fresche Solutions is working to close that disconnect with a series of educational courses centered squarely on the intersection of IBM i and Watson.

  Last year, Fresche Solutions worked with IBM last year to put together a series of onsite training seminars aimed at giving IBM i professionals the educational tools they …

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• 2019 Predictions: IBM i Trend Spotting

  January 23, 2019 Alex Woodie

  What will happen in the IBM i community this year? Maybe IBM will launch a public cloud service? Or IBM i shops will find the budget to get busy with application modernization? It’s really anybody’s guess, which is why IT Jungle solicited predictions from prominent names in the community to get their take on what will happen this year.

  The wider IT community is moving quickly to adopt next-gen development methodologies, and those will increasingly find their way into the IBM i community in 2019, predicts Dan Magid, vice president of solution sales with Rocket Software.

  “2019 will bring …

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• Skytap Says It’s Building a ‘True Cloud’ Offering for IBM i

  December 5, 2018 Alex Woodie

  IBM i shops have a multitude of managed service providers (MSPs) to choose from for private cloud capabilities, but those looking for a public, AWS-like cloud experience are out of luck. Now an outfit called Skytap is looking to change that by providing a “true cloud” experience that lets IBM i customers scale up and down capacity from a Web GUI.

  Skytap was founded in Seattle, Washington, about 12 years ago to facilitate the development, testing, training, and modernization of enterprise applications destined to run in the public cloud. The venture-backed outfit used its expertise in virtualization to help customers …

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• Scaling Up For Cyber Monday With IBM i

  November 26, 2018 Alex Woodie

  A fulfillment company that’s expected to process millions of transactions on an IBM i server today will lean heavily on a slim layer of RPG-based Web services technology to keep the commerce flowing for its large clients. But there’s nothing stopping the middleware, dubbed iWebSrv, from simplifying data integration for clients in other industries.

  Retailers work all year to ensure they’re ready for the massive surge of traffic that springs up after Thanksgiving. For bricks-and-mortar types, Black Friday is their make-or-break day, while those with an omni-channel bent have Cyber Monday prominently circled on their calendars.

  Consumers are expected to …

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• Data Needs To Be Anonymized For Dev And Test

  November 14, 2018 Scott Heinlein

  (Sponsored Content) Every company needs to create applications and then test those applications against a database that has real data in it. And therefore, most companies will take their test data from production databases and make a copy of it, or a subset of it, to do such testing, usually by doing a bulk copy. And at that moment, all of the sensitive data in that database is exposed to the programmers and testers.

  Given that in excess of 80 percent of information leaks start from an internal source, this is a potential – and possibly great – …

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• Modernizing IBM i Apps with Microservices

  November 7, 2018 Alex Woodie

  Application modernization means different things to different people. For some, it could be turning a 5250 screen into a Web or mobile interface, or replacing database access with SQL. But for others in the IBM i community, including the vendor OpenLegacy, modernization refers to exposing existing business logic as APIs through a microservices architecture.

  Microservices refers to a software development technique whereby applications are broken down into multiple self-contained components and served via APIs in a loosely coupled but coordinated manner. The main advantage of this approach is each microservice is built independently of others, which can boost productivity and …

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• Infor Elaborates on Coleman, IBM i Strategy

  October 10, 2018 Alex Woodie

  When Infor held its annual Inforum conference two weeks ago, the new AI bot Coleman played a big part, but nary an IBM i word was muttered publically. But that shouldn’t come as a concern to the thousands of companies that rely on the company’s IBM i software to run their businesses, Infor’s IBM i strategy Ross Freeman leader says.

  “We heard the same from Syteline customers. They didn’t hear much about Syteline,” says Freeman, who heads up IBM i strategy for the LX, XA, and System 21 ERP product lines. “We have 235 products and we’re all following the …

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• Domino On IBM i Poised For A Comeback

  September 24, 2018 Alex Woodie

  IBM hasn’t exactly been knocking the cover off the ball lately when it comes to the Domino family of products running on IBM i, or any platform for that matter. But when IBM and its new development partner HCL finally unveil Domino 10 to the world on October 9, it will be the start of a great comeback story.

  That’s the prediction of Domino consultant Kim Greene, who has been working with the software on the IBM i platform for many years. Greene has been closely watching events unfold since HCL Technologies partnered with IBM to develop Domino and related …

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• Visual LANSA Goes Low-Code With High Tech Update

  August 15, 2018 Alex Woodie

  As one of the original advocates of fourth-generation language (4GLs), LANSA knows a thing or two about the value of abstraction layers. While the hype around 4GLs has long since passed, LANSA continues to build on its foundation with new features aimed at keeping customers ahead of the technology curve. That work is on display with the recent update to its “low-code” environment, Visual LANSA version 14 SP2.

  Visual LANSA is LANSA‘s flagship integrated development environment (IDE) for creating modern graphical applications. The IDE employs numerous techniques to minimize the amount of Rapid Development and Maintenance Language (RDML, its …

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