• 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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• Thoroughly Modern: Understanding Your IBM i Web Application Needs With Application Discovery

  February 8, 2021 Scott Gingerysty and Derek Woods

  Considering web and mobile development on IBM i? Before you start coding, it’s helpful to assess and validate your vision with a Discovery. Adding this step to your development process increases the likelihood that your project will succeed because it gives stakeholders a clear understanding of what you need, how the application will solve users’ problems and what it will cost.

  Fresche’s Web Application Development team is frequently called upon to consider a new business application and estimate how much it will cost to build it. With the amount of detail we typically have at this point (to wit: almost …

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• A Chat With Steve Woodard, The New CEO At Fresche Solutions

  December 16, 2020 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Here is one way you know that the IBM i market is still a good one. Smart people who like to make money, and in fact have to make money for their investors, keep buying up the big players in the software spaces related to the IBM i platform, and they are also successively profiting from those acquisitions and those sales as they create big conglomerates that serve the IBM i community.

  So it is American Pacific Group (APG) has become the majority shareholder in Fresche Solutions, which is based in Montreal and which is without question the largest company …

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• Thoroughly Modern: What’s New With PHP On IBM i?

  December 7, 2020 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  If you use PHP on IBM i, you’ve likely seen some recent announcements about some great changes coming to the open-source language. According to the latest blog post from Zend on PHP 8, there are a number of new functions being introduced including str_contains, str_starts_with, and str_ends_with, preg_last_error_msg and get_debug_type. In addition, the core PHP 8 engine has many new features, optimizations and improvements in the type system, error handling, and consistency. The key areas include:

  • JIT Compiler
  • Fatal errors on incompatible method signatures
  • LSP Enforcement
  • Resource “Classes”
  • Assertion behavior
  • XML-RPC is now in PECL
  • Reflection changes

  This is …

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• Thoroughly Modern: A Wealth Of Funding Options Makes It Easier To Take On Modernization

  November 9, 2020 Jeff Lovette

  Investment in IT is being driven by a new conversation – the value-aligned technology stack. The pandemic/recession is triggering the need for coordinated, business-led technology strategies that bring costs under control and harvest more value from technology to transform the business. Even before the events of 2020 began to play out, it wasn’t always easy to get funding for key IT initiatives, and now, as the world tries to come to grips with our new reality, it may seem even tougher. But it doesn’t have to be that way.

  From a business sense, three key notions stand out from our …

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• Fresche Unveils X-Replay for 5250 Testing

  October 14, 2020 Alex Woodie

  Fresche this week rolled out X-Replay, a new tool designed to automate the testing of 5250 greenscreen applications. Unlike other tools that work on screengrabs or X-Y coordinates, X-Replay software works at the field-name level, which makes test scripts more resilient to change, according to Fresche, which now boasts a complete lineup of IBM i testing tools.

  Fresche has been providing tools for IBM i testing for a while now, mainly with X-Analysis, its cross-reference analysis tool, as well as X-Dataset, which ensures good management and security of data involved in testing. However, when it comes to testing 5250 screens …

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• Thoroughly Modern: Speed Up Application Development With Automated Testing

  October 12, 2020 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Starting with the System/38 and even more so with the AS/400 and its progeny, the hallmark of the system, at least according to IBM, was its ease of use. This is not exactly the right idea. While the integrated nature of the platform means it is easy to deploy, and the self-management nature of tech support, database administration, and even system administration yields an ease of management, and the tight coupling of the relational database management system with the high-level compilers has definitely yielded an ease of programming.

  It is that last bit that is the hallmark …

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• Now You Can Transform RPG Code Into PHP

  September 21, 2020 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Assuming an average of 5 million lines of code at IBM i shops – a number I heard recently thrown around – in their homegrown or heavily customized third party applications, IBM i shops are collectively sitting on something like 750 billion lines of code. Just ponder that for a minute.

  This code, which is predominantly written in RPG but with a fair proportion of Java and COBOL plus a smattering of more modern languages, is going to have to be maintained and tweaked in the coming years. Just like it had to be updated and debugged time and again …

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• Thoroughly Modern: The Smart Approach to Modernization – Know Before You Go!

  September 14, 2020 Daniel Crépeau

  In today’s rapidly changing digital economy, the ability to keep up, compete and quickly adapt is critical. Every industry, from transportation and logistics to banking, retail, insurance and even manufacturing, is facing business challenges that are forcing them to think about how they can manage change and be ready when disruption occurs.

  Like many others, your organization probably had to evaluate how your systems could adapt to the changes that occurred over the past several months. Here’s an example that you might have seen in your own neighborhood: Restaurant #1 has been developing the ability for customers to place orders …

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• Thoroughly Modern: Strategic Things to Consider With APIs and IBM i

  August 10, 2020 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  The great thing about application programming interfaces is that many of the ways that programmers need to interact with system and application software are predefined and allow for consistent access to features and functions as well as data. To a certain extent, the APIs are what make such software useful. The API describes how the interface works, and libraries (in the sense of the software market at large, not the OS/400 and IBM i definition of that word) are developed to implement the functionality of the interface.

  The fun bit is that not only system software makers like IBM get …

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