• Thoroughly Modern: What To Pack For The Digital Transformation Journey

  October 16, 2019 Emmanuel Tzinevrakis

  Welcome to a new column called Thoroughly Modern. The name is meant to convey the idea that we need to define the desired – if ever-evolving – end state of our businesses and the people, processes, and programs that encapsulate how everything works when we get there.

  It is a given that everyone understands that digital transformation is sweeping every industry, with incumbents being challenged by upstarts – and each other – as they try to create new and better ways to provide products and services to customers in a modern, digital world. We accept this as a first …

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• Sometimes Even DIYers Need A Little Help

  October 7, 2019 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  If there ever was a crowd that liked to do it themselves, it is the IBM midrange. Well, probably more like half to two-thirds of the IBM midrange. But you know what I mean.

  These companies started programming way back in the 1970s with one of Big Blue’s System/3 or System 32, or System/34 machines, and moved on to the System/38 or the System/36. The former launched in 1978, a decade after the System/3 that started it all in Rochester, Minnesota, and the latter came out in 1983, five years before the AS/400. The machines had sophisticated batch and interactive …

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• Monoliths, Microservices, And IBM i Modernization: Part 1

  October 7, 2019 Alex Woodie

  What’s the best approach for application modernization: Maintain the monolithic architecture, or break it into individual microservices? This is an important question, especially for IBM i shops that are looking to take their considerable investment in encoded business logic to the next level.

  At first blush, the answer seems obvious: Monolithic architectures are bad, and microservices are good. Monolithic architectures, which are still quite prevalent in the IBM i world, proliferated from the 1970s well to the 2000s thanks in part to the popularity of packaged ERP suites that automated a multitude of processes and also to the programming inclinations …

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• Guru: Enumerated Data Types In RPG

  September 16, 2019 Ted Holt

  IT has changed a lot since I entered the field several decades ago, but some things have not changed. I would read in those early days that COBOL was dead, and I read the same thing now. Yet COBOL is 60 years old and still going strong. Back then I heard RPG criticized as “Real Poor Garbage”. These days I hear it scorned as “legacy”, which I assume is supposed to mean the same thing. Yet today’s RPG is better than any of its predecessors for business programming.

  RPG supposedly does not have the features of modern languages. Maybe not, …

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• Guru Classic: My Favorite Keyboard Shortcuts for RSE/RDi

  July 17, 2019 Susan Gantner

  When using RDi for editing my CL, DDS, RPG, or COBOL code, I find that I can save a lot of time by using keyboard shortcuts for functions that would otherwise require that I take my hands off the keyboard to use the mouse. So I thought I would share a few of my favorites. Many of the shortcuts I use are standard for other applications that I also use for email, spreadsheets or text editing. It’s easy to forget that some of those same shortcuts can be used when we’re editing our RPG code.

  A lot has changed on …

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• 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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