• After A Few Short Years, VS Code Passes Rational Developer for i

  February 23, 2026 Alex Woodie

  It has finally happened: Visual Studio Code has passed Rational Developer for i in usage, according to the 2026 version of Fortra’s IBM i Marketplace Survey. The survey also shows lower adoption of greenscreen ADTS and increased use of DevOps tools, demonstrating some positive trends in IBM i application development.

  It’s been barely two years since Fortra started asking IBM i customers about their use of Visual Studio Code, the free, Web-based integrated development environment (IDE) originally developed by Microsoft and set free as an open source project in November 2015. The 2024 survey (which was conducted in late 2023) …

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• Rocket Delivers More DevOps Capabilities For IBM i

  November 17, 2025 Alex Woodie

  Rocket Software recently put the finishing touches on a range of updates for Rocket DevOps, its suite of automation, change management, and testing solutions for IBM i. The top enhancements customers will find are two-way Git integration, AI-powered anomaly detection, unit testing enhancements, and support for IBM i DevOps workflows in Microsoft Azure Pipelines.

  It’s been a 2.5 years now that Rocket Software completed the rebrand from the old Aldon change management products, which it obtained with its 2011 acquisition, to Rocket DevOps. That Rocket DevOps rebrand involved taking the old Aldon Lifecycle Manager products – which helped automate …

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• IBM Just Killed Merlin. Here’s Why

  October 20, 2025 Alex Woodie

  The writing had been on the wall for some time, and IBM finally made it official as part of the Technology Refresh for IBM i on October 7. That was when Big Blue announced the immediate withdrawal from marketing and service for its Modernization Engine for Lifecycle Integration product, commonly called Merlin. It will likely go down in IBM i history as a well-intentioned product that got some things right, but which ultimately could not overcome its flaws.

  The introduction of Merlin back in May 2022 represented a sizable shift in IBM’s approach to application development on IBM i. Prior …

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• VS Code Will Be The Heart Of The Modern IBM i Platform

  June 23, 2025 Sebastien Julliand

  For application programmers, the workspace is not a place to sit with a screen, a keyboard, a chair, but rather is an integrated development environment within which code can be created, shared, compiled, and managed either inside the tool itself or through plug-in extensions that link it to other tools. IDEs have been around for decades and are not anything new. What is new is how suddenly popular one particular IDE – VS Code – has become.

  For the past several years, nearly three quarters of the programmers in the world polled for the Stack Overflow Developer Survey say that …

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• IBM Banking on Merlin 2.0 to Goose Modern Development on IBM i

  June 19, 2024 Alex Woodie

  IBM last week shipped most of the new stuff unveiled in the Spring Technology Refreshes, which includes Merlin 2.0, the Web-based application development and modernization environment for IBM i. Big Blue is betting that the new and improved offering will encourage IBM i shops to (finally) begin their journey toward truly modern coding techniques.

  Friday, June 14 marked the start of general availability for the majority of the features IBM is including in IBM i 7.5 TR4 and IBM i 7.4 TR10, which it announced on May 8. The version 2.0 release of Merlin – whose official IBM name …

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• MDNA Launches Unit Testing Tool for IBM i

  June 19, 2024 Alex Woodie

  Midrange Dynamics North America (MDNA) recently launched a new unit testing tool that’s designed to make it easier for IBM i developers to test their code. The software, called MDTest, is works with RDi and VS Code and integrates with MDNA’s change management software for IBM i.

  MDNA created MDTest to provide for a simple way for developers to unit test their ILE code. The software automates the process of executing test scripts, recording results, and determining whether the software can be pushed into the next stage of the DevOps processes.

  The product includes about 30 pre-built software quality tests …

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• DevOps Means Using The Tools You Already Have Better

  April 24, 2024 Jeff Tickner

  In this world, there are always more than two ways to skin a cat, but the best way to skin any cat is the way you already know how to do it.

  The same is true of application development from within a DevOps toolchain. When modernizing development processes on IBM i, the most efficient thing to do, always, is to make use of enterprise tools already in place within the organization and integrate these into a cohesive IBM i workflow that shepherds code from idea to production all along the way.

  It may seem obvious to say so, but trust …

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• What’s Up with Open Source on IBM i?

  March 27, 2024 Alex Woodie

  Open source software has become a steadfast component of the IBM i stack. But what open source software are IBM i shops using today? Results from Fortra’s recent IBM i Marketplace Survey provide answers.

  It may seem odd now, but open source hasn’t always been a staple of the IBM i server’s software diet. Until PHP arrived on the platform two decades ago, proprietary software was the only option for IBM i shops.

  But today, IBM i shops have hundreds of open source products to choose from. Thanks to the IBM i server’s openness, just about any product that can …

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• Rocket Launches CM-Kit for Continuous Modernization

  December 13, 2023 Alex Woodie

  You’ve read about continuous integration and continuous delivery, or CI-CD. Now Rocket Software wants you think about a related topic called continuous modernization, which refers to an uninterrupted re-invention of your applications via Web enablement and APIs. It recently launched a new suite of software, called the Continuous Modernization Kit, to help customers deliver that on their IBM i servers.

  Web-enablement of greenscreen 5250 applications has been a thing since at least the late 1990s, when the dot-com boom drove the initial commercialization of the Internet. That was followed closely by mobile enablement, which Apple turbocharged with its 2007 launch …

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• Rocket DevOps Now Supports VS Code

  September 25, 2023 Alex Woodie

  IBM i developers who prefer to code within VS Code can now get all the goodness of automated change management and CI/CD with Rocket Software’s DevOps offering, which now supports the popular browser-based development environment, among other new features.

  VS Code, which is short for Visual Studio Code, has rocketed to popularity in the IBM i community over the past couple of years. That popularity is due in large part to Code for IBM i, the Liam Allan-developed plug-in that brings ILE language support to Microsoft’s open source IDE.

  Allan, who is known to despise IBM’s full-fledged Java-based IDE, …

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