• Guru: Enumerated Data Types In RPG

  September 16, 2019 Ted Holt

  IT has changed a lot since I entered the field several decades ago, but some things have not changed. I would read in those early days that COBOL was dead, and I read the same thing now. Yet COBOL is 60 years old and still going strong. Back then I heard RPG criticized as “Real Poor Garbage”. These days I hear it scorned as “legacy”, which I assume is supposed to mean the same thing. Yet today’s RPG is better than any of its predecessors for business programming.

  RPG supposedly does not have the features of modern languages. Maybe not, …

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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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• Guru: Preamble Comments

  April 15, 2019 Chris Ringer

  Do you remember what you ate for lunch two days ago? If you’re like me, you had to think about it for a minute before answering. Now imagine trying to recall the detailed requirements of a few programs you wrote a year ago so you can modify them for a new project. Or better yet, what if someone else like a retired employee or a traveling contractor coded these programs? At this point you may become very dependent on any comments they left in the code.

  It’s been said that any time spent commenting on your code now might save …

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• What New Language Will IBM i Support Next?

  March 27, 2019 Alex Woodie

  The prospect of a new language coming to a platform is always reason for excitement. New languages bring new capabilities, or at least faster ways to tap into existing capabilities. The question for those living and working on the IBM i platform is what language will come next?

  RPG remains the go-to language used by the vast majority developers on the IBM i platforms. According to the 2019 survey by HelpSystems, 84 percent of coders on the box use RPG. COBOL, RPG’s partner in legacy crime, is also supported in the Rational Development for IBM i RDi, along with …

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• Building Out The .NET Stack Around Mono for IBM i

  March 13, 2019 Alex Woodie

  The first release of a Mono .NET port to IBM i was issued last year. Since then, the IBM i open source community has been busy building many of the other middleware components that will make it easier for developers to build IBM i applications using Microsoft tooling.

  Mono was ported to AIX and IBM i (via the PASE AIX runtime) last year, which gave IBM i and AIX shops the capability to run the open source .NET runtime on Power Systems servers, thus opening the door to allowing Microsoft‘s highly regarded suite of development tools to be …

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• More IBM i Predictions For 2019

  February 6, 2019 Alex Woodie

  We kicked off our 2019 soothsaying last week with predictions from IBM i leaders on what the New Year will bring. We keep the ball rolling this week with another batch of predictions from our friends around the IBM i community.

  According to Alison Butterill, IBM‘s the program director for offering management for IBM i, the platform will build off the momentum generated with last year’s 30th anniversary celebrant.

  “The excitement begun in 2018 as we highlighted client innovation around the world will continue into 2019,” Butterill says. “The momentum continues to grow as clients are looking at ways …

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• Inside The Latest ALL400s Report

  February 6, 2019 Alex Woodie

  In early 2018, John Rockwell started a survey from his ALL400s website in an attempt to glean more information about the state of midrange community. Many of the questions are about which products IBM i professionals use, but the survey also digs into other aspects of the relationships that people and organizations have with the platform, including plans to migrate off IBM i.

  According to the latest ALL400s survey of the midrange community, more IBM i shops say they have no plans to move off the platform. It was a small increase — from 57.5 percent last April who said …

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• Mono Port To IBM i Now Available

  October 31, 2018 Alex Woodie

  IBM i shops that want to run Microsoft .NET can now do so through the Mono middleware, which was officially ported to IBM i and AIX earlier this year by the Mono community. While the port is not feature complete, Mono can now run on IBM i 7.1 and higher via the PASE AIX runtime. It’s not a native port, but it’s better than nothing.

  Mono is an open source implementation of Microsoft’s .NET Framework, including a C# compiler and the Common Language Runtime (CLR), that allow .NET applications to run on non-Windows platforms, including Linux, MacOS, BSD, various flavors …

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• CM First Removes IBM i Requirement From ALM

  October 17, 2018 Alex Woodie

  Companies that are adopting the application lifecycle management (ALM) software from CM First no longer need an IBM i server, the company announced recently. The move with CM MatchPoint is intended to widen the deployment options for CM First’s targeted customer base, which is CA Plex and 2E users.

  CM MatchPoint is used to automate the development of CA Plex and CA 2E environments, particularly among large development teams that are geographically dispersed. The software manages several aspects of Plex and 2E development, from user-submitted change requests and workflow to version control and deployment.

  With the delivery of CM MatchPoint …

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• Trinity Guard Gives Audit Tool A Friendly GUI

  June 25, 2018 Alex Woodie

  IT professionals who are tired of using 5250 greenscreens to manually conduct regulatory audits of their IBM i systems may be interested in a colorful piece of software from Trinity Guard. The company recently launched TGCentral, which is a unified HTML interface designed to simplify the configuration and execution of security and regulatory audits across multiple IBM i servers.

  As the spiritual and intellectual successor to PentaSafe, Trinity Guard understands how beloved those old PentaSafe products were. Even though NetIQ/Attachmate/Micro Focus has not added any new features to its IBM i security suite for over a decade, there were …

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