• IBM Kills iAccess for Windows, Older RDi Versions

  April 18, 2018 Alex Woodie

  Spring is still weeks away in the Upper Midwest, where it still feels like winter. But that didn’t stop the IBM i leadership in Rochester, Minnesota from embarking upon some spring cleaning by sending out to pasture some development tooling and admin interfaces for IBM i, including older releases of RDi and all of iAccess for Windows.

  IBM yesterday announced that effective April 30, 2019, it will withdraw IBM i Access for Windows. That announcement puts the final nail in the coffin of the old Windows-based client that traces its roots back to OpsNav.

  Here’s the short announcement posted to …

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• Tesla Teases IBM i Software Vendor Into Some Experimental Coding

  April 16, 2018 Dan Burger

  First of all, let me assure you this is not Car & Driver. You’re going to hear about a car and a driver, but the resemblance stops there. The driver is Alex Roytman and the car is a Tesla Model 3. I’d describe the car as a “cross-over” because it appeals to driving enthusiasts and technology geeks. I’d describe Roytman as an enthusiast, more so in the second category than the first.

  Loyal IT Jungle readers are familiar with Roytman because he’s the CEO of Profound Logic, an IBM i modernization company specializing in Web and mobile application …

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• Rocket Gits Hip to Emerging IBM i Tech

  January 31, 2018 Alex Woodie

  When it comes to managing traditional IBM i development environments, Rocket Software has its bases covered. But as younger technologies and younger developers find their way onto the platform, Rocket found that it had some work to do to ensure that DevOps – or application lifecycle management (ALM), if you like — runs as smoothly as its enterprise customers expect. That’s the case with the vendor’s announcement today around Git.

  Rocket Software today announced that it’s now supporting Git with the Aldon Lifecycle Manager (Enterprise Edition), the company’s ALM product for open systems environments like Windows, Linux, and Unix. The …

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• Fresche Plan: Guidance Leads To Growth

  December 4, 2017 Dan Burger

  Without wings, an airplane has no chance to fly. A legacy-based IBM i shop is like an airplane without wings. During the past few years, more companies have recognized that IT modernization is necessary. It’s a complex problem with many moving parts and deserves a strategic approach for best results. At the same time, the transition has become an easier problem to solve.

  Tools have evolved and much of the manual labor that was once required has been automated. And service providers have stepped up to handle work that companies are ill-equipped to take on themselves. Companies that are quick …

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• Mainframe And IBM i Share App Dev Testing Tool

  November 29, 2017 Dan Burger

  The integration of disparate IT systems is on the priority list for many companies aggravated by the duplication of effort and the cost tooling for each development environment. It’s fueled the rise of DevOps and the big picture view emphasizing speed and collaboration. For IT environments that share mainframe and IBM i platforms, we have uncovered software that allows applications written in COBOL, PL/I, EGL, RPG and Assembler to share a single tool for testing programs.

  The tool is called XaTester and it’s available through IBM and the company, Xact Consulting, that created it. Xact Consulting is an international …

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• Should Spark In-Memory Run Natively On IBM i?

  November 6, 2017 Alex Woodie

  There’s a revolution happening in the field of data analytics, and an open source computing framework called Apache Spark is right smack in the middle of it. Spark is such a powerful tool that IBM elected to create a distribution of it that runs natively on its System z mainframe. Will it do the same for its baby mainframe, the IBM i?

  So, what is Apache Spark, and why should you care? Great questions! Let’s introduce you to Spark.

  Spark came out of UC Berkeley’s AMPLab about five years ago to provide a faster and easier-to-use alternative to MapReduce, which …

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• Java On IBM i: A Developing Situation

  October 16, 2017 Dan Burger

  IBM i developers in the Java camp have some changes in store as Java 9 replaces Java 8. First of all, there will be no IBM i support for Java 9. This break in tradition may come as a surprise for many IBM i developers, but not for those Java-holics who have been closely watching the Java 9 news. There are a couple of reasons IBM has decided not to support Java 9 on IBM i, even though IBM currently supports Java 7 and Java 8 and it has supported every Java release seemingly since Moby Dick was a minnow. …

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• Guru: Error Handling in SQL PL, Part 2

  October 16, 2017 Ted Holt

  In the previous episode of this exciting, action-packed series, I introduced you to the exception-handling methods that IBM has built into SQL PL. The cliff-hanger has lasted four months now, much too long. It’s high time I explained RESIGNAL, as I promised I would. I will explain SIGNAL while I’m at it.

  Before I start the syntax lesson, I need to explain a bit of philosophy. I use the hit-the-ball-drag-Harry method of exception-handling when I embed SQL in RPG and COBOL programs. That is, I execute a command, test the SQL state, execute a command, test the SQL state, …

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• One IBM i Route Into the API Economy

  September 27, 2017 Alex Woodie

  The so-called API Economy is emerging as a legitimate engine for driving the growth of commerce around the world. But with mostly monolithic apps written years ago, the IBM i installed base isn’t well positioned to be a major player. However, there are alternative pathways into the API Economy for IBM i shops, if they know where to look.

  The API Economy refers to the idea that, by exposing bits and pieces of our internal systems out to the world through well-defined application programming interfaces (APIs) – which usually manifest REST-based Web services, although SOAP and XML files will work …

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• The Cognitive Systems/500 2018 Edition

  June 12, 2017 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  With the Power9 processor not coming to the IBM i and AIX platforms until sometime early in 2018, rather than right now as many of us were led to believe would be happening, we have some extra time on our hands. So we should all – including the executives who run IBM Systems and its subordinate Cognitive Systems division (formerly known as Power Systems) – take this opportunity to take a hard look at how the IBM i platform is packaged and priced and how a modern integrated platform should be architected.

  The IBM i customer base needs the Cognitive …

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