• Sometimes Folks Only Learn The Hard Way About Keeping Software Current

  February 1, 2021 Rob McNelly

  School’s been out for me for a very long time, but I still enjoy learning. I gain a sense of satisfaction whenever I learn something new. Specific to technology, exposure to new concepts helps me understand how things work together. I cannot count the number of times where I watched over someone’s shoulder, or watched someone on a shared screen, to learn about a new tool or technique, or a different way to set up my desktop or environment.

  Watching and listening to people is my preferred way to learn, but other forms of education – reading IBM Redbooks and …

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• 2021 Predictions for IBM i: Part Two

  January 20, 2021 Alex Woodie

  The response from the first batch of IBM i prediction we ran last week was superb. Here’s hoping that the community finds the second batch of predictions equally as worthwhile.

  Chris Wey, the president of the Power Business Unit at Rocket Software, wonders if crystal balls have any power left following the events of last year. “After an unpredictable 2020, the very notion of predictions is called into question,” Wey says. “Still, as an optimist, I believe we will see some incredibly positive outcomes of the past year’s turmoil in the coming year in our space.

  “First, Power systems …

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• The Prickly Pear Of Auto ID For IBM i

  December 16, 2020 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Good companies can batten down the hatches and pilot their enterprise through rough economic waters, but great companies identify opportunities and successfully pursue them whether or not times are good or bad. It takes a bit of pliability to be adaptable enough to not just accept change, but to embrace it, and also to be certain enough of your company and its customers to build a core user base and just serve those customers relentlessly with steady improvements. This is a tough balancing act, but if you look at the case studies, you find this balance is what gives companies …

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• VS Code Provides Another Coding Option for IBM i

  December 9, 2020 Alex Woodie

  IBM i shops that are looking for an alternative to IBM’s Rational Developer for IBM i (RDi) may want to check out a lightweight code editor from Microsoft called Visual Studio Code (VS Code). Thanks to extensions for IBM i languages developed by the opensource community, VS Code can support native development in RPG, CL, and SQL.

  First released by Microsoft in 2015, VS Code provides a basic environment for writing and editing code. It features debugging, syntax highlighting, intelligent code completion, snippets, and code refactoring, as well as embedded Git. It runs on Windows, Linux, and Mac, and while …

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• Open Source The Path To Software Riches For IBM i

  December 2, 2020 Alex Woodie

  For what is supposed to be a proprietary platform, the IBM i server sure has a lot of open source software running on it. In recent months, it appears that the majority of new programs introduced to IBM i are open source in nature. That pattern shows no signs of changing any time soon, according to a recent report by OpenLogic.

  Open software has existed on the IBM i platform for many years. The first highly publicized dip into the open source well occurred in 2005, when IBM partnered with a company called Zend to bring its PHP runtime to …

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• Guru: SQL Writes CL

  November 30, 2020 Ted Holt

  SQL is the one tool I cannot work without. Take it away from me and I’ll start driving a truck for a living. Naturally I’m eager to find more ways to make SQL work for me. Today I’d like to share how I recently used SQL to write a huge CL command for me. This is a technique that’s good to know.

  My challenge was to copy all of the several hundred physical data files in a library to a save file so that those files could be loaded onto another IBM i system. The Save Library (SAVLIB) command was …

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• How The Latest TRs Bolster The Core IBM i OS

  October 7, 2020 Alex Woodie

  Yesterday was Technology Refresh (TR) day for IBM and its IBM i operating system, and Big Blue didn’t disappoint. The company unveiled new releases of IBM i 7.4 and 7.3 that bring a slew of new capabilities to the core operating system as well as surrounding offerings like Db2 Mirror, ACS, and RDi. In this article, we’ll look at enhancements to the core OS and related key features.

  During a COMMON webcast Tuesday, IBM i Chief Architect Steve Will touched broadly on a number of enhancements that soon will be available in the TRs. Most of the new capabilities will …

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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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• Is It Time To Rename RPG?

  August 24, 2020 Alex Woodie

  Should IBM rename RPG, and if so, what should the new name be? It’s an interesting idea, and one that was recently floated by a member of the IBM i community, who submitted an official request for enhancement (RFE) on the matter. The crux of the argument is that full free-format RPG is such a dramatic departure from fixed-format RPG that it deserves a new name. But will IBM, which owns the language, go along with the change?

  Report Program Generator, or RPG, debuted way back in 1959, at the dawn of the computer age, as a way to replicate …

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• New Option Emerges for Refactoring IBM i Apps

  August 19, 2020 Alex Woodie

  IBM i shops that want to refactor their RPG and COBOL applications into different languages have a new option available to them. In late June, Astadia and Blu Age announced they’re working together on a new service that automates the conversion of customers’ older apps into Java and .NET code that can run on X86 systems in your basement or the cloud.

  Based in Boston, Massachusetts, Astadia claims to have completed more than 200 mainframe migrations and more than 100 mainframe modernization projects over about two-and-a-half decades. The company has modernized millions of lines of COBOL code running on mainframes …

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