• Monoliths, Microservices, and IBM i Modernization: Part 2

  October 14, 2019 Alex Woodie

  Microservices are the future, right? After reading part one of this series, you can be excused for thinking that. Breaking up applications into smaller components brings clear benefits to both the development and operations staff, and clearly is an architectural approach that has a lot of momentum. But it turns out there might be practical limits to how far the microservices approach can take us.

  “Loosely coupled, yet tightly integrated.” That phrase became something of a running joke at an Infor conference attended by this reporter several years ago. The company at the time was betting heavily on its ION …

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• Monoliths, Microservices, And IBM i Modernization: Part 1

  October 7, 2019 Alex Woodie

  What’s the best approach for application modernization: Maintain the monolithic architecture, or break it into individual microservices? This is an important question, especially for IBM i shops that are looking to take their considerable investment in encoded business logic to the next level.

  At first blush, the answer seems obvious: Monolithic architectures are bad, and microservices are good. Monolithic architectures, which are still quite prevalent in the IBM i world, proliferated from the 1970s well to the 2000s thanks in part to the popularity of packaged ERP suites that automated a multitude of processes and also to the programming inclinations …

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• Midrange Dynamics Dives Into REST With Acquisition

  October 2, 2019 Alex Woodie

  Change management specialist Midrange Dynamics this month announced that it has acquired Rest4i, the UK-based developer of a native IBM i framework for integrating RPG and SQL applications with REST-based APIs. The move positions Midrange Dynamics as a player in the rapidly evolving world of microservices.

  Rest4i was founded several years ago by Stuart Milligan, who headed up DB2 database modernization firm Databorough before selling it to Fresche Solutions (then Fresche Legacy) back in 2013. Milligan foresaw the coming wave of microservices and developed software to “turn the IBM i into a complete REST API server and the RPG developers …

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• LANSA Revs Low-Code, UI Modernization Tools

  October 2, 2019 Alex Woodie

  LANSA is under new ownership, but that doesn’t appear to be slowing down the delivery of software, as the company has shipped a pair of product updates for IBM i and other platforms in recent months. That includes a new release of Visual LANSA, its flagship low-code development environment, and aXes, its screen modernization tool for 5250 apps.

  In July, LANSA announced a new release of aXes, its tactical modernization tool for converting 5250 applications into Web interfaces. aXes, which LANSA acquired 10 years ago, provides a way for IBM i shops to convert 5250 screens on-the-fly without any …

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• Boutique Footwear Company Finds A Great Fit With Node.js

  August 19, 2019 Alex Woodie

  As one of the premier providers of winter footwear in North America and Europe, Kamik knows what it takes to run a successful manufacturing operation. But when its custom RPG-based ERP system started to show its age, the company turned to Node.js to help modernize production systems, and found that it improved application integration and developer productivity along the way.

  “Legacy” is a word that the folks at Kamik can take pride in. Founded in Quebec in 1898, Kamik remains a family owned business to this day, with factories located in Canada and the United States. Through its brand-name and …

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• Midrange Dynamics Speeds Table Updates In Db2 Mirror Clusters

  August 5, 2019 Alex Woodie

  With the launch of Db2 Mirror with IBM i 7.4 in June, IBM heralded the age of continuous availability on the midrange platform, bringing IBM i up to par with Windows and Linux platforms. However, while the new software keeps production data in perfect synch, it’s not so great at keeping up with changes to underlying database tables. That’s an area that Midrange Dynamics is addressing with its change management software.

  With Db2 Mirror, IBM has essentially extended a single-server database implementation into a clustered database with two active nodes. As soon as a piece of data is created, updated, …

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• Remain Breaks New Ground With ALM Suite

  July 15, 2019 Alex Woodie

  Coding season just ended for Remain Software, the Dutch application lifecycle management (ALM) vendor with a growing US presence. That means customers are sorting through a torrent of new functionality in its flagship TD/OMS product, including improved hooks to DevOps tools like Git and Jenkins, a new cross-platform cross-reference module, and a nifty API generator too.

  New stuff started emerging from Remain Software around the POWERUp conference in May, when IT Jungle sat down with company representatives to talk about development trends, current and upcoming releases of Remain’s software, and what customers are looking to get next.

  Arguably the biggest …

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• CNX Welcomes 5250 Apps Into Valence Framework

  June 12, 2019 Alex Woodie

  For years, CNX has prided itself on providing the IBM i community with development tools for creating modern Web applications on the platform. The company looked unapologetically to the future, and encouraged customers to move on from their green-screen pasts. But in response to strong customer demand, the company has relented and decided to allow green screens into the framework via an innovative new Web-based emulator dubbed Fusion5250.

  Fusion5250 is all about giving customers choice, CNX says. The software, which is a core new feature in Valence 5.2+, lets Valence customers access a modern application developed with CNX’s Nitro App …

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• Fresche Bullish On ‘Factory’ Approach As IBM i Market Improves

  June 5, 2019 Alex Woodie

  Factories offer a level of repeatability, predictability, and efficiency that make the manufacture of goods simpler, less risky, and more profitable than it would otherwise be. Now the folks at Fresche Solutions are taking a factory-based approach to a markedly different endeavor: the modernization of IBM i applications. The early returns from Fresche indicate some optimism may be in order.

  Last week at the POWERUp conference in Anaheim, California, Fresche Solutions CEO Andy Kulakowski and his team spoke at length with IT Jungle about its new factory approach to selling modernization software and services, as well as the recent successes …

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• Guru: Application Tracing With The QTRC APIs

  May 20, 2019 Dawn May

  The IBM i operating system is extensively instrumented for diagnostic purposes to help IBM resolve issues should they arise. Instrumenting your application for diagnostics is also possible in a manner very similar to what IBM has done in the operating system.

  STRTRC and the QTRC APIs

  The operating system includes a trace facility called QTRC. This trace facility is a set of APIs (QTRC APIs) that allow you to instrument your application to collect trace data.  This trace data can be whatever you may find helpful for debugging applications in a production environment, where using a debugger is …

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