• Stop Coding In C and C++, Feds Say

  December 2, 2024 Alex Woodie

  Two federal agencies asked the IT world last month to stop developing applications in memory unsafe languages like C and C++ and to come up with roadmaps to migrate existing apps. While the security alert is unlikely to have a major impact on IBM i application development, the C family of languages does have a presence on the IBM midrange server that will be very tough to remove.

  Organizations should immediately stop developing new applications written in memory unsafe languages like C and C++, the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) and the Federal Bureau of Investigations (FBI) warned last …

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• How To Have The Wisdom Of Experts Woven Into Your Code

  October 14, 2024 Nicholas DeLessio

  No matter how far you are down the road with your DevOps automation journey, or even if you’re not yet starting that journey, it’s probably a good idea to have a code checker; not everyone can have a Linus Torvalds review their work (as famously happens with the open source Linux kernel), but there are automation tools available for various languages and platforms that do static code analysis and they are the next best thing.

  These tools, sometimes called “code linters” (because they remove the fuzzy bits out of application logic like actual linters remove imperfections stuck to our clothing), …

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• What the 2024 Marketplace Report Says About IBM i App Dev, Language Use

  March 13, 2024 Alex Woodie

  What languages, development environments, and tools are IBM i developers currently using to create new applications? How many users are still on SEU? And how are VS Code and Merlin faring among Web-based development tools? Fortra sought to answer those questions with its IBM i Marketplace Survey for 2024, and the results may surprise you.

  In late 2023, Fortra surveyed 270 IBM i professionals from around the world for the 2024 IBM i Marketplace Survey, which it published in January. You can download the report here.

  For the most part, Fortra asks the same questions every year, which is …

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• If It Ain’t Broke, Don’t Fix It

  March 13, 2024 Alex Woodie

  The information technology industry has a “newness” bias. It always has, and probably always will. But when it comes to the systems for processing business transactions, decision makers need to think carefully about what they’re doing, as ditching “legacy technology” for a shiny new one doesn’t always deliver the promised upgrade.

  The cloud is currently the hot new thing in IT. Even though it’s not necessarily “new,” and not necessarily “a technology” (it is a collection of technologies and a platform and a business model…), business owners are under tremendous pressure to “get to the cloud” by whatever means necessary. …

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• Guru: Procedure Driven RPG And Adopting The Pillars Of Object-Oriented Programming

  February 19, 2024 Gregory Simmons

  The four pillars of object-oriented programming (OOP): abstraction, encapsulation, inheritance, and polymorphism, were not created at a single point in time. They evolved gradually over several years, with contributions from various researchers and programmers. Here’s a brief overview of their evolution:

  1. Abstraction:

  • Alan Kay is credited with introducing the concept of abstraction in the 1960s with his work on Simula.
  • Abstraction gained further traction with the development of Smalltalk in the 1970s.

  2. Encapsulation:

  • David Parnas, in his 1972 paper “On the Criteria To Be Used in Decomposing Systems into Modules,” laid the groundwork for encapsulation by emphasizing the importance of

  …

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• IBM i Job Outlook for 2024 Not Great, But Not All Bad Either

  January 17, 2024 Bob Langieri

  First, the good news: Salaries for IBM i and RPG developers and programmers continue to go up. Average salaries of new hires of senior developers in 2023 have been getting $120,000 to $130,000. I predict this going up 6 to 10 percent in 2024, to $127,000 to $143,000. Some with specialized skills will get 10 to 20 percent more.

  This is why it’s important to add to your skills. IBM i salaries still pale compared to other more popular platforms and skills. Hiring is still very slow in the IBM RPG world as companies are doing more with less! Hot …

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• IBM Releases Db2 For i Extensions For VS Code

  October 9, 2023 Alex Woodie

  Interested in developing new ILE applications in VS Code that utilize the Db2 for i database? Then you’re in luck, because IBM recently created and released vscode-db2i, an open source database extension for Code for IBM i, the uber popular development environment that enables ILE programming in VS Code.

  It is tough to overstate the popularity of Code for IBM i, which Liam Allan created and released just over two years ago. The open source plug-in provides ILE functionality for Microsoft’s VS Code, enabling programmers to write and edit RPG, COBOL, C, and CL code in the lightweight, browser-based …

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• The First Step In DevOps Is Not Tools, But Culture Change

  September 25, 2023 Andrew Clark

  The combination and automation of application development and IT operations, commonly known as DevOps, is itself like the processes it automates – it is a process of continual change through iteration and improvement. And so, like most things in life (other than vacation, maybe), it is a journey – not a destination.

  When people think about a DevOps roadmap journey, they are typically thinking about putting in some kind of DevOps tooling like git or Jenkins; this is really not the place to start – the first step on the DevOps roadmap, for most companies, is actually a culture change. …

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• ASNA Generates First-Class C# from RPG with Encore

  August 2, 2023 Alex Woodie

  ASNA this summer unveiled a new version of Monarch, its flagship offering for migrating RPG applications to .NET Core. The big new deliverable with Monarch 11 is the introduction of Encore RPG, which enables IBM i shops to convert their RPG directly into usable C# source code. The new product will help IBM i shops with aging RPG programmers make the gradual transition to C#, ASNA says.

  ASNA originally launched Monarch way back in 2004 as a mechanism for converting RPG code into a language supported in Microsoft’s .NET Framework (Microsoft replaced the .NET Framework with .NET Core back in …

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• IT Modernization Goes Beyond The Apps, Kyndryl Says

  April 17, 2023 Alex Woodie

  When the word “modernization” is said in the midrange and mainframe circles, it usually means application modernization, or transforming your older RPG and COBOL applications to look and feel like they just came off the Java or C# assembly line. But there’s another view of modernization that encompasses more than just the apps, and according to a new report from Kyndryl, there’s quite a bit of work to do.

  While Kyndryl is certainly familiar with the application modernization needs of IBM i and System Z shops, the company (formerly IBM Global Technology Services) takes a broader view of the term, …

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