• Thoroughly Modern: Augmenting Your Programming Today, Solving Staffing Issues Tomorrow

  July 12, 2021 Leo Lymberopoulos

  Do you have a back-up for when your programmers are on vacation? If not, where would you look to fill the decades of knowledge that is needed to support your RPG or COBOL applications? Who are you going to turn to when your star IBM i programmer – your only programmer – announces plans to retire at the end of this year?

  Organizations that run IBM i applications have found themselves in some tricky situations. IBM i is a robust platform and your programmers have spent decades building and maintaining your applications to fit your business. However, as skilled RPG …

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• So You Want To Do Containerized Microservices In the Cloud?

  June 30, 2021 Alex Woodie

  As a modernization consultant working in IBM’s Rochester, Minnesota, lab, Amy Anderson gets to hear from some of the most tech-savvy IBM i shops in the world. Her job requires her to know where shops are now, listen to where they want to go, and chart a path that takes them there. That can sometimes be quite a challenge, especially considering the rapid pace of technological change at the moment.

  “One of the things that we’re seeing now is the whole industry now is focused on modernization,” Anderson said during her session at the recent NAViGATE conference hosted by COMMON …

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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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• A Million Miles Away From Machine Learning

  May 24, 2021 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  The spring COMMON NAViGATE conference has not yet started, the IBM Think 2021 conference has just ended and so has Google I/O 2021, and only a month ago we participated in Nvidia’s GPU Technical Conference 2021. A whole lotta things are rattling around in our brains, and we are still thinking about some of the things people have been saying about artificial intelligence, the instantiation of which based on machine learning techniques seems to work quite well but no one really knows, in the same way a COBOL or RPG program is absolutely deterministic, why it works.

  This is …

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• RPG Gets the ‘Splits’ with Latest TRs

  May 5, 2021 Alex Woodie

  The latest batch of Technology Refreshes (TRs) for IBM i 7.4 and 7.3 wasn’t a barnburner by any means. But the twice-yearly update brought a little bit of new stuff for everybody, including RPG programmers, who gain three new built-in functions, one of which is called %SPLIT.

  RPG remains the most popular language on the IBM i platform, with a solid 87 percent share, according to the recent HelpSystems Marketplace Report, nearly twice the share of Java and over four times the share of COBOL. Good old Report Program Generator, for what it’s worth, is the closest thing to the …

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• ILEditor2: Satisfying The Need For Development Speed

  April 28, 2021 Alex Woodie

  Liam Allan doesn’t like anything to slow him down. “I’m impatient,” says the young IBM i phenom. So when he’s writing RPG or COBOL, the code editor had best keep up with him. That’s a problem using something like Rational Developer for IBM i (RDi), which Allan doesn’t particularly care for. And that is one of the primary reasons why Allan developed ILEditor, which is now in its second incarnation as ILEditor 2.

  Just over a year ago, Allan and his business partner, Connor Holyday, shipped the first release of ILEditor 2. The pair had just completed an extensive …

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• When Cloud Meets DevOps on IBM i

  April 7, 2021 Alex Woodie

  We’re witnessing multiple macro trends play out in the IT industry, with the rise of cloud computing and managed services being one of the most compelling storylines in 2021. How software is developed is changing too, with DevOps tools and agile methodologies rapidly becoming the norm. When these two trends converge in our little neck of the woods, it can leave IBM i customers wondering where to go. With their recently formed partnership, ARCAD Software and Connectria have mapped out one path.

  A decade ago, companies were still unsure of the cloud. They would dabble with adding development, test, and …

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• Low-Code API Development Gets A Boost From Profound

  March 10, 2021 Alex Woodie

  Profound Logic last week launched Profound API, a new product designed to enable the development and management of RESTful Web services with a minimal amount of coding. The browser-based product works with IBM i programs and data, as well as assets located off the box, and is designed to enable even entry-level IT professionals to get into the API game.

  Application programming interfaces (APIs) have been around for decades. Nearly every developer will call or expose an API at some point in their lives. But APIs have been gaining new momentum lately as a critical layer enabling the future of …

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• Thoroughly Modern: Running CA 2E Applications? It’s Time To Modernize The UI

  March 8, 2021 Nick Hampson and Scott Gingerysty

  While CA 2E, formerly known as Synon, isn’t discussed as frequently in the IBM i space as RPG or COBOL, customers tell us that it provides tremendous value and competitive differentiation for their organization. In many cases, these applications have been reliably running mission-critical business applications for decades.

  However, Synon also comes with risks, such as a shrinking pool of Synon resources. Classically trained Synon programmers are scarce and most programmers who are working with Synon today have picked it up from someone else. Sure, they can build a business application, but when they go outside the basics of the …

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