• Kafka, JSON, DevOps: Future Proof Your IBM i With Secure, High Performance APIs

  October 26, 2022 Daniel Magid

  It is an exciting time to be working with an IBM i! The Rochester lab and IBM partners are rapidly pushing out new technology options that allow you to do anything with the IBM i that you can do on any other platforms. The latest in web and mobile user interfaces, the most modern languages, comprehensive security, machine learning, data visualization, internet of things, APIs – are all available to IBM i users. When combining all that technology with the unmatched reliability, ease of management and low cost of ownership of IBM i, you can be confident that your company …

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• Finally, IBM i Cloud Dev Instances That Are Powerful And Cheap

  October 24, 2022 Chuck Paolillo

  Back in the old days, when IBM had relatively inexpensive entry AS/400 and iSeries machines and was willing to lease them at special low rates to developers, it was possible for software houses and independent code slingers to get their hands on machinery to create and modify applications. Those days are long gone, and it has been very difficult to replace that cheap and usable functionality in the marketplace.

  With Windows Server and Linux platforms, things are a lot easier because developers can create a variant of their X86 server environment right on their desktops or laptops, and if need …

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• How The Latest TRs Bolster App Dev For IBM i

  October 17, 2022 Alex Woodie

  From Merlin and VSCode to RDi and RPG, good IBM i boys and girls who do their own development will get new toys to play with before Christmas, thanks to a range of new features and functions unveiled by IBM last week as part of its latest Tech Refresh for IBM i.

  The introduction of the IBM i Modernization Engine for Lifecycle Integration, or Merlin, was the big attraction this spring with the launch of IBM i version 7.5 and 7.4 TR6 (it was later made available for IBM i 7.3). The offering, which combines a lightweight VSCode development environment …

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• IBM Unveils Fall 2022 Tech Refreshes for IBM i

  October 12, 2022 Alex Woodie

  IBM yesterday announced Technology Refreshes for its two most current IBM i operating systems, including 7.5 and 7.4. Security continues to be a big driver of new functionality with 7.5 TR1 and 7.4 TR7. But the fall TRs bring a bevy of enhancements across all areas, including the database, IBM i services, open source, application development, and analytics, among others.

  Security has been the number one concern for CIOs for a few years now, and IBM has responded with a number of new features in IBM i. Some of the new security features exist in IBM i Navigator, the GUI …

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• Kyndryl Wants to Connect Your IBM i to Microsoft Azure

  October 12, 2022 Alex Woodie

  Kyndryl, the former IBM division known as Global Technology Services (GTS), last week unveiled an expanded partnership with Microsoft that will see it helping IBM i and System z customers integrate their applications and data with Microsoft Azure, specifically its low-code, no-code development platform called Power.

  Kyndryl’s alliance with Microsoft will make it easier for companies to leverage the valuable data and business logic contained in their midrange and mainframe assets as they develop new applications in the Microsoft Power Platform, which is a low-code, no-code development environment.

  “Basically, it provides a low-code, no-code environment in Azure for programmers,” …

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• Thoroughly Modern: Simplify IBM i Application Management and Extract Key Insights

  October 10, 2022 Ray Everhart

  IBM i developers and managers understand all too well that application documentation is often out of date – if it even exists. A study from the Singapore Management University says that developers only spend 5 percent of their time writing new code. They spend 20 percent of their time modifying legacy code, and they spend 60 percent of their time trying to understand the code before they modify it.

  As businesses adapt to compete in their industries, IT is pressured to innovate and improve agility while maintaining existing systems. It’s also critical that stakeholders can quickly access data from …

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• Are Code Freezes a Thing of the Past?

  October 5, 2022 Alex Woodie

  After months of work on your modernization project, the consultant helping you is almost done. That’s the good news. The bad news is that the consultant is now asking you to put a code freeze on changes to your old application. It’s not clear whether the code freeze will lasts two months or two years, but it’s absolutely necessary, you’re told.

  That’s the scenario that many enterprises have faced over the years. Whether it’s a monolithic RPG application running on IBM i or a distributed Node.js application running in the cloud, if there are tight dependencies in the components that …

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• Thoroughly Modern: Latest IT Trends – Bring Security, Speed, And Consistency To IT With Automation

  August 8, 2022 Alan Hamm and Chris Koppe

  The irony of many IT departments is that they have spent many decades automating aspects of the business, literally encoding business processes and interactions with customers, partners, and suppliers to make those processes consistent and fast, but many of the processes used in the IT department itself are done manually and rely on the “tribal knowledge” of the system and application experts.

  This is not only not necessary in many cases today, thanks to a myriad of automation tools that can be brought to bear on IT operations, but it is also dangerous and extremely risky. The systems that run …

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• Altair Delivers More Options for Running SAS Code

  August 1, 2022 Alex Woodie

  Companies that have legacy SAS code for analytic applications running on IBM i servers and other platforms but don’t want to pay the SAS Institute for the runtime have another option from Altair, which recently acquired World Programming.

  SAS was the dominant language for analytics for decades, starting in the 1970s, when Jim Goodnight and his colleagues developed the language at North Carolina State University. Goodnight went on to found the SAS Institute, which provided runtime and support for the open SAS code and, in the process, became the dominant provider of SAS solutions.

  The SAS hegemony has only …

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• Guru: IBM i Experience Sharing, Case 5 – Using IBM i PDI Charts To Answer Performance Questions

  July 18, 2022 Satid Singkorapoom

  During my long career as an IBM i performance specialist, it was natural for people to ask me performance-related questions of various kinds. But in many cases, it seemed to me that the customer could not understand my answers, and I could not provide supporting evidence due to the lack of a performance reporting tool that could produce easy-to-understand explanatory information. The situation changed for the better with the availability of IBM i Performance Data Investigator (PDI) tool as of release 6.1. I would say that the PDI tool provides charts of information that resemble those used by business people …

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