• Original and Midrange Dynamics in IBM i Test Tie-Up

  October 20, 2021 Alex Woodie

  In the fast-paced world of DevOps, it’s critical to test your applications in a timely fashion. The quicker you can spot bugs and other issues, the quicker you can fix them and get the new features into production. That’s the gist behind a new partnership recently unveiled by Original Software and Midrange Dynamics, two of the leading providers of DevOps and test automation tooling, respectively.

  On September 30, the two vendors announced they have entered into a partnership that will not only see them marketing to their respective customer bases, but also integrating their respective offerings to deliver, as they …

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• Thoroughly Modern: Making The Case For Code And Database Transformation

  September 13, 2021 Robert Arce

  The last 18 months, we have seen many companies shift their IT plans and prioritize digital transformation around internal and external access to their systems. Some had started their modernization efforts which made the transition easier while many others who thought they had plenty of time had a rude awakening. So many ways of doing business have changed – and they have changed forever. In the face of such rapid changes, companies have realized that IBM i modernization is inevitable.

  

  Simply put, it is about figuring out:

  • How to enhance an application by applying best practices, creating resilient code and

  …

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• In The API World, Nobody Knows You Are An IBM i

  August 2, 2021 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  One of the earliest memes of the early years of the commercial Internet was captured in a famous cartoon in The New Yorker magazine penned by Peter Steiner and showing a dog at a computer, which quipped: “On the Internet, nobody knows you’re a dog.”

  Somewhere back in the archive – it was in September 1997, which is not online because we were a paper, subscription publication for the first seven years of The Four Hundred – we did a riff on this meme with a lead essay called, On The Net, No One Knows You Are An AS/400. …

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• In Search Of Next Gen IBM i Apps

  June 28, 2021 Alex Woodie

  What will become of our RPG and COBOL applications? If IBM i chief architect Steve Will has his way, the core elements of them will evolve into what he calls “next gen” applications that can run in the cloud, if necessary.

  “We are not just focusing anymore on trying to help clients get past green screens to mobile interfaces or Web interfaces,” Will said during his recent COMMON NAViGATE session, titled IBM i PLUS Cloud is the Answer. “There are still clients and applications that need to get there. We understand that. But you can’t just stop there now. …

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• Modern Tools For A Modern IBM i

  May 26, 2021 Alex Woodie

  IBM i shops may be in for a rude awakening when they suddenly realize their applications are not keeping up with the times. How can these IBM i shops get on the right track in the modernization department? A trio of IBMers offered some tips.

  Brad Bentley, Tim Rowe, and Kris Whitney took to the virtual airwaves last week to present “IBM Tools for Modernizing Your IBM i Applications,” a one-hour webinar from IBM. Application modernization is an extremely broad topic, as the 266-page IBM Redbook of the (almost) same name will attest to, so they obviously didn’t cover …

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• ARCAD Plugs IBM i DevOps Suite Into Microsoft Azure

  January 18, 2021 Alex Woodie

  IBM i developers can now leverage a collection of DevOps tools on the Microsoft Azure cloud platform, courtesy of a new integration announced in December 2020 by ARCAD Software.

  Azure DevOps is an end-to-end DevOps environment that provides a range of project management services for developers who are building software to deploy on Azure or other platforms.

  Microsoft ostensibly introduced the software as a service (SaaS) offering back in October 2018. But in reality, Azure DevOps is the latest name of a product that can trace its lineage back to 2006, when Microsoft launched Visual Studio Team System.

  Through its …

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• Jenkins Gets Closer IBM i Hooks, Courtesy Of ARCAD

  September 14, 2020 Alex Woodie

  For some time, IBM i shops have been behind the curve when it comes to using modern DevOps and continuous integration/continuous delivery (CI/CD) technologies and techniques. ARCAD Software has been working to close that gap through its work with Git and Jenkins, and thanks to its new integration with an enterprise version of Jenkins from CloudBees, the gap is pretty much closed — at least from a technology point of view.

  Jenkins, if you don’t know yet, is a popular open source project that allows DevOps professionals to build, test, and deploy their software as part of a CI/CD …

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• New IBM CEO’s First Hundred Days: A Mixed Bag

  August 10, 2020 Alex Woodie

  How did Arvind Krishna do during the first 100 days of his new job as the CEO of IBM? Krishna took the helm during a remarkable stretch in early April, when COVID-19 was clamping down on businesses of all sizes, so he will be forgiven for not completing the wholesale transformation of the 109-year-old company into the hybrid cloud leader during that time. Just the same, some people expected more from him.

  The selection of Krishna by IBM’s board of directors is important because he was the architect of the $34 billion Red Hat acquisition, which was announced in October …

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• The All-Knowing, Benevolent Dictator Of Code

  November 6, 2019 Sebastien Julliand

  Not every software project can have an all-knowing benevolent dictator looking through every line of code, and even all projects could have such a person to oversee the quality of the code, there is no reason to not automate as much of this very important code review job as is possible.

  Luckily for IBM i shops, there is such a tool to help with code review, and in that sense, we suppose, you can install rather than hire that all-knowing benevolent dictator of application code. It’s called, appropriately enough, CodeChecker, and it has been available from ARCAD Software for quite …

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