• Remain Bolsters Development Options with TD/OMS

  September 18, 2024 Alex Woodie

  Remain Software recently rolled out a major upgrade to its change management software for IBM i. The big enhancements with TD/OMS 16.1 include the availability of Remain’s Web-based development framework, dubbed Octo, as well as support for the popular Web-based IDE, VS Code.

  Remain Software introduced Octo more than two years ago as a lightweight Web-based framework to unite its various IBM i offerings. Short for Open Core for Technology Orchestration, Octo was initially put forward as a way to integrate and display information from other Remain Software applications, such as TD/OMS, Gravity, API Studio, and MiWorkplace, its lightweight, Web-based …

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• CICS Transaction Server For IBM i Is Sunsetted

  September 16, 2024 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Way back during the Y2K crisis at the turn of the century, there were a lot of IBM mainframe shops that decided to port their COBOL applications and their related CICS transaction monitoring software to OS/400 rather than try to move to a new language and a new transaction monitor.

  Mainframe COBOL and CICS are a bit different from OS/400 – and now IBM i – COBOL and CICS, but there was enough similarity that companies with large COBOL/CICS estates could make the jump from the ES/9000 to the AS/400 and IBM i platform, and thousands of such companies – …

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• Some Thoughts On Big Blue’s GenAI Strategy For IBM i

  August 12, 2024 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  In a world that has gone half mad with generative AI, it is refreshing to see the people who control the IBM i platform being skeptical, hopeful, and practical about how the technology might be used to help the companies who choose Power Systems running IBM i as the platform for their mission critical applications.

  IBM Rochester has always been practical and often innovative when it comes to adopting hardware and software technologies, so the strategy that IBM i chief technology officer Steve Will laid out in a recent IBM i & AI – Strategy & Update as part of …

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• How To Contribute To IBM’s GenAI Code Assistant For RPG

  July 15, 2024 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Back in October 2023, IBM launched its “Project Hopper” Watsonx Code Assistant for Z, which as the name suggests is a programming assistant that will eventually be built into the open source VS Code integrated development environment that was created by Microsoft and that is being explicitly trained to help programmers take applications coded in COBOL and convert them to Java. We speculated back then about how LLMs and GenAI might be used to do similar – and different – things for the IBM i platform, and back in May at the POWERUp 2024 conference Steve Will, the chief …

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• Where Do RPG Programmers Come From? And Other IBM i Questions

  July 10, 2024 Alex Woodie

  The IBM i community has faced a skills crunch off and on for the past decade or longer, as Baby Boomers retire and IBM i shops struggle to find replacements. One big reason for the hiring gap is that the old ways of finding new RPG programmers and other IBM i professionals no longer work like they used to, according to IBM i educator Jim Buck.

  “What they did for years was they just stole from the guys down the road,” said Buck, who is the president and CEO of IBM i training company imPower Technologies. ‘“I’ll go to …

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• Thoroughly Modern: The Synon Transformation Journey, From Legacy To Modern Java Solutions

  July 8, 2024 Chris Koppe

  In today’s evolving tech landscape, companies that run CA 2E (Synon) on IBM i face significant challenges hindering progress and sustainability. Synon represents a fraction of the market share in IBM i environments, far behind RPG and COBOL, and IBM’s recent announcement to cease PL/I support in future OS versions will impact compliance for SOX-regulated and other industries.

  Moreover, shifts in ownership – from Computer Associates to Broadcom – cast doubt on Synon’s long-term viability and continued support. A dwindling pool of Synon developers, brittle applications that are difficult to integrate with modern technologies, and cryptic database structures further add …

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• Profound Brings GenAI Tech To IBM i Apps with Profound AI

  June 24, 2024 Alex Woodie

  For more than 20 years, Profound Logic has been at the cutting edge of bringing the latest Web, mobile, and API technology to IBM i shops. With the launch of Profound AI, it’s now helping IBM i shops adopt the latest in user interface tech: natural language and generative AI.

  GenAI has taken the world by storm since OpenAI launched ChatGPT in late 2022. Since then, nearly every large enterprise has explored the potential for using large language models (LLMs) to develop a range of GenAI products, including chatbots, autonomous agents, question-and-answering systems, and knowledge management apps.

  Despite the potential …

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• Rocket Finally Gets Its RUMBA, And A Whole Lot More

  June 10, 2024 Alex Woodie

  Sixteen years is a long time to wait, but that’s how long it took Rocket Software to acquire the assets of what used to be NetManage, which includes the popular 5250 emulator RUMBA. Rocket failed to buy NetManage back in February 2008, but it finally completed the deal for the NetManage assets in May 2024. And it got a whole lot more in a $2.275 billion deal that netted it about half of OpenText’s Micro Focus assets and puts its revenue over the mark of $1 billion per year.

  Micro Focus, you will recall, was the company that swooped in …

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• IBM i PTF Guide, Volume 26, Number 21

  June 10, 2024 Doug Bidwell

  Once again, here is a reminder that a big change has come to patching IBM i systems. IBM i APAR and PTF records have migrated to Known Issues records and Fix Information records to be consistent with other IBM patching systems for other platforms and software. So read up on it at this link.

  We also have one new security vulnerability that you need to be aware of since we last published the IBM i PTF Guide. The vulnerability is outlined in Security Bulletin: Denial of service vulnerabilities in Node.js affects IBM Rational Developer for i RPG and …

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• IBM Developing AI Coding Assistant for IBM i

  May 22, 2024 Alex Woodie

  During his keynote presentation at the POWERUp 2024 conference Monday, IBM i CTO Steve Will announced that IBM is actively exploring ways to incorporate generative AI into the IBM i platform. The most promising of three individual but related projects is a plan to build a large language model (LLM)-powered coding assistant for IBM i that will initially provide three functions to support RPG development, with more expected in the future.

  The genesis of the coding assisting project for RPG, which doesn’t have a name yet, can be traced to last year’s launch of watsonx Code Assistant for Z, which …

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