• PSGi Offers Field-Level Encryption for IBM i Database

  April 19, 2023 Alex Woodie

  IBM i professionals who are concerned about the disclosure of sensitive data in their legacy applications may be interested in a new field-level encryption utility from Precision Solutions Group (PSGi). The software essentially functions as an easy-to-use wrapper for IBM’s native Field Proc for database encryption, delivering flexible data protection for legacy applications.

  PSGi has made a name for itself by providing third-party maintenance and support for aging IBM i-based ERP systems. Customers running older applications like JD Edwards World, PRMS, PRISM, and KBM rely on PSGi to keep their ERP systems running well decades after they were first created. …

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• Wanted: Code For IBM i Contributors

  April 10, 2023 Alex Woodie

  If you have a knack for IBM i development and a passion for open source, then Liam Allan, the creator of the Code for IBM i project, would like a word. That’s because Allan, faced with large demands from his day job at IBM, is seeking help from the IBM i community to develop and maintain the Code for IBM i project.

  “Myself and the core team (three other people) are a little overwhelmed by our workload, balancing jobs and maintaining a large project is tough,” Allan wrote in a March 9 blog post on Ryver, the Web-based forum …

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• LANSA Developing Business Intelligence Tool

  March 29, 2023 Alex Woodie

  LANSA is rolling out a new Web-based business intelligence tool. Dubbed LANSA BI, the new offering is based on an underlying analytics engine from Yellowfin and will be targeted predominantly at IBM i shops looking to give users greater access to actionable data.

  LANSA has used its fourth-generation language (4GL) development environment as a springboard for many other technological endeavors over the years. From Web and mobile modernization environments to application and data integration tools, from ecommerce engines to ERP suite, the Downers Grove, Illinois, company has been there and done that.

  It has even offered customers some rudimentary query …

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• Db2 Web Query: Way More Than Just A Query Tool

  February 27, 2023 Alex Woodie

  You might be forgiven for thinking that Db2 Web Query is just a way to run your SQL queries on IBM i from a browser. After all, “Web” and “query” are right there in the name, aren’t they? But the product’s name belies the true nature of this multi-threat analytics application, which can do a whole lot more for IBM i shops than just run queries.

  IBM’s Doug Mack tackled this reality-assumption gap during a recent webinar on Db2 Web Query, which received a bunch of new capabilities with the recent version 2.4.0 upgrade. Mack, a longtime IBMer whose …

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• Infoview Systems Launches Lightweight CDC for IBM i

  February 13, 2023 Alex Woodie

  IBM i shops that have a need to extract the latest transactions hitting their Db2 for i database for downstream CRM, analytics, or fraud detection use cases may want to check out the new change data capture (CDC) offering unveiled recently by Infoview Systems. When coupled with a streaming data platform like Apache Kafka, CDC opens up new possibilities.

  Infoview Systems is a longtime IBM i product and services firm based in Michigan with a global customer base. The company has been active in the data and application integration space for years, first with the sale and implementation of message …

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• Longtime Product Guy Sarrasin Switches to Services

  February 8, 2023 Alex Woodie

  For two decades, Marcel Sarrasin was a product guy. Starting in 2001, Sarrasin helped to develop, market, and sell IBM i software, first for BCD, then Quadrant, and finally Fresche. But last year, Sarrasin got a change of scenery when Fresche promoted him to head up its growing services unit, giving the young executive a significant boost in responsibility and the chance to positively impact an important business line for Fresche: digital transformation services.

  If you’ve ever been to a COMMON conference or attended a BCD, Quadrant, or Fresche Solutions webinar, there’s a good chance you’ve run into Sarrasin. For …

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• Realizing The Promise Of Cross Platform Development With VS Code

  January 25, 2023 Jeff Tickner

  An integrated development environment is like a tractor or a truck, or indeed any other kind of tool. There are farmers who want a tractor from John Deere or Ford or Massey-Ferguson, contractors who want a Ford or Dodge or GMC truck, and carpenters and electricians who use Dewalt or Milwaukee Electric or Makita cordless tools.

  No matter the choice of tools, ultimately these blue collar workers are going to farm and build things, and the choice of tool should not interfere with that effort. White collar – or far more likely no collar T shirt – programmers are no …

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• 2023 IBM i Predictions, Part 1

  January 16, 2023 Alex Woodie

  What will happen in the IBM i world in 2023? Your guess is as good as ours, which is why we have corralled some of the most respected names in the industry to gaze into their crystal balls and give their prognostication for the year to come.

  Donnie MacColl, the senior director of technical support and GDPR data protection officer at Fortra (formerly HelpSystems), kicks off this year’s batch of predictions with an expectation of more automation, thanks to a lack of skilled employees.

  “Automated operations will accelerate along with migration to the cloud,” MacColl tells us. “Automation is key …

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• Loopback Hackathon Set for Next Week

  January 11, 2023 Alex Woodie

  The Loopback Hackathon organized by Common Europe last fall was such a hit that the organization is teaming up with COMMON North America for another hackathon next week. And like the previous hackathon, this one is also focused on using IBM i with Loopback, a popular Node.js framework for rapid development of REST APIs.

  Mark Irish, an advisory software developer with the IBM lab in Rochester, Minnesota, was tapped to lead the first Loopback Hackathon, which took place in the Netherlands. Spearheaded by Common Next Gen, a youth-oriented group that’s part of Common Europe, the event was a big …

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• Is Julia Coming to IBM i Next?

  January 11, 2023 Alex Woodie

  IBM has brought several popular open source languages to the IBM i operating system over the years, including PHP, Node.js, R, and Python. Now some are speculating that Julia, a high-performance general purpose language that has been widely adopted in data science, may be next.

  Julia is a high-level programming language that is applicable to a range of fields, but has mostly been used for technical computing, such as numerical analysis, scientific computing, and data science. Originally developed in 2009 by a group of MIT researchers, the language was designed to be fast and efficient, with a just-in-time (JIT) compiler …

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