• IBM Bolsters RPG And COBOL Development

  May 13, 2019 Alex Woodie

  Amid the many and varied enhancements that IBM rolled out last month for its IBM i operating system was a collection of improvements for its core development tooling, including the Eclipse-based Rational Developer for i (RDi) as well as Rational Development Studio for i, which contains the RPG and COBOL compilers.

  Let’s start with the RPG and COBOL compilers in Rational Development Studio for i, since updates to these strategic pieces are more infrequent than the updates to RDi, which shares a common base with integrated development environments (IDEs) for other operating systems and therefore updated more frequently.

  The biggest …

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• Does Db2 Mirror Kill The Market for Third Party HA?

  May 6, 2019 Alex Woodie

  IBM launched Db2 Mirror for i two weeks ago to great acclaim, as the clustering technology puts IBM i on par with how most other major systems provide continuous availability. But will Db2 Mirror destroy the platform’s heritage of high availability solutions? IT Jungle asked IBM and the biggest providers of logical replication solutions, and the answer is no. Here’s why.

  The first thing to understand about Db2 Mirror is that, at heart, it’s a database clustering technology. IBM figured out a way to make a single instance of Db2 for i run on two separate systems, in an active-active …

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• IBM Brings Active-Active Mirroring Into Db2 For i Database

  April 24, 2019 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  As a platform that is approaching 40 years of deployment within enterprises that can’t afford downtime with their mission critical systems – that’s counting the System/38 as well as the AS/400 and its follow-ons as part of the same continuum – it is no surprise at all that IBM midrange systems running RPG and COBOL had some of the most sophisticated – and perhaps the only application-centric – clustering software ever developed.

  Concurrent with the launch of IBM i 7.4 this week, Big Blue is rolling out a new kind of database clustering, which is called Db2 Mirror, that is …

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• RTPA Looking For A Few Good Software Reviewers

  April 8, 2019 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Throughout the six decades of commercial computing, one thing has been universally true. Every good application development or system management tool, from the simplest debuggers all the way up to complex DevOps systems that can absorb multiple continuous streams of new code being mashed up against old code without making a mess of things, got its start because some programmer or administrator was so annoyed at how something worked – or more precisely didn’t work – that he or she created a new tool that did the job a whole lot better.

  This is precisely the beginning story of Real-Time …

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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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• Assessing IBM i’s Role In Digital Transformation

  March 20, 2019 Alex Woodie

  There comes a time in every application’s life when its owner must take a hard look at its continued viability and ask the tough question: Will the application continue to meet the business’s evolving needs, or should the whole thing be scrapped for something new? These business and technology assessments can be especially tough when the software runs on the IBM i server.

  Many companies these days are looking to modernize their aging IT systems in the hopes of gaining more agility and flexibility. Whether you call it digital transformation or application modernization, the goals are often similar: Simplify the …

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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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• Fifty Years Of Operating IBM Systems

  March 11, 2019 Bill Hansen

  The world is celebrating some important 50th anniversaries this year. My interests in aerospace and music led me to recall four events from 1969. The most famous event was the first manned moon landing in July, which occurred the same week that I turned 21. Two months before that was the first flight of the Concorde supersonic transport. I mark the beginning of the “summer of love” with the Woodstock concert, and its end with the tragic concert at Altamont Speedway. (Who knew that Hell’s Angels would not make great security guards?)

  For me, all of this pales in comparison …

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• The 1980s Were Great, Just Not for Business Computers, Apparently

  March 11, 2019 Alex Woodie

  Looking back, it’s plainly obvious that the 1980s were nothing short of awesome. It gave us the Space Shuttle, Van Halen, the fall of Communism, and the Dodge Caravan. The Internet went global, Star Wars went viral, and Super Mario introduced a generation of Generation Xers to video games. But apparently, when it comes to business computers, the decade was nothing sort of dreadful.

  At least that’s what we’re to believe from a recent Bloomberg Businessweek article titled America’s Cities Are Running on Software From the 1980s, published February 28. The story laments the travails of the City (and …

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• Building A Positive Culture of Learning On IBM i

  February 18, 2019 Alex Woodie

  How do you motivate IBM i programmers to keep learning new technologies, long after they have mastered the RPG skills they use the most? There’s no simple answer to that question, which was the topic of a recent conversation IT Jungle had with PHP on IBM i guru Alan Seiden and Heidi Schmidt, the head of PKS Software.

  IBM i shops face several interrelated problems when it comes to their personnel, which traditionally is one of the biggest line items in the IT budget. These challenges include: the aging of IBM i professionals; the retirements of baby boomer-aged personnel; the …

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