• What The Open Source Roadmap Holds For IBM i In 2021

  March 15, 2021 Alex Woodie

  2020 was whirlwind of a year when it comes to open source on IBM i, with many major new open source products coming to the platform. The roadmap for open source software in 2021 may not be quite as active as last year, but there will be some compelling new technology to play with, coming from IBM and the community, IBM’s open source guru Jesse Gorzinski tells us.

  “Last year was a pretty big year for open source,” says Gorzinski, whose official IBM title is senior business architect for open source software on IBM i. “In 2021, we’re going to …

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• Guru: For IBM i Newcomers, An Access Client Solutions Primer

  March 1, 2021 Rob McNelly

  I enjoy reading about IBM i Fresh Faces. Sure, it’s refreshing to see that it’s not just graybeards like me who are working on the platform, but what really matters is that young people are learning about, getting hands-on with, and coming to love IBM i. I appreciate that many of these stories revolve around system/application modernization and open source solutions. This gives newcomers to IBM i a degree of comfort by reducing their learning curve.

  Learning any new technology is challenging. Specifically, how do you go from learning about the concepts to actually getting on a machine and …

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• 2021 Predictions for IBM i: Part Two

  January 20, 2021 Alex Woodie

  The response from the first batch of IBM i prediction we ran last week was superb. Here’s hoping that the community finds the second batch of predictions equally as worthwhile.

  Chris Wey, the president of the Power Business Unit at Rocket Software, wonders if crystal balls have any power left following the events of last year. “After an unpredictable 2020, the very notion of predictions is called into question,” Wey says. “Still, as an optimist, I believe we will see some incredibly positive outcomes of the past year’s turmoil in the coming year in our space.

  “First, Power systems …

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• ARCAD Plugs IBM i DevOps Suite Into Microsoft Azure

  January 18, 2021 Alex Woodie

  IBM i developers can now leverage a collection of DevOps tools on the Microsoft Azure cloud platform, courtesy of a new integration announced in December 2020 by ARCAD Software.

  Azure DevOps is an end-to-end DevOps environment that provides a range of project management services for developers who are building software to deploy on Azure or other platforms.

  Microsoft ostensibly introduced the software as a service (SaaS) offering back in October 2018. But in reality, Azure DevOps is the latest name of a product that can trace its lineage back to 2006, when Microsoft launched Visual Studio Team System.

  Through its …

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• VS Code Provides Another Coding Option for IBM i

  December 9, 2020 Alex Woodie

  IBM i shops that are looking for an alternative to IBM’s Rational Developer for IBM i (RDi) may want to check out a lightweight code editor from Microsoft called Visual Studio Code (VS Code). Thanks to extensions for IBM i languages developed by the opensource community, VS Code can support native development in RPG, CL, and SQL.

  First released by Microsoft in 2015, VS Code provides a basic environment for writing and editing code. It features debugging, syntax highlighting, intelligent code completion, snippets, and code refactoring, as well as embedded Git. It runs on Windows, Linux, and Mac, and while …

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• Remain Software Delivers Trio of Updates

  November 11, 2020 Alex Woodie

  Remain Software last week announced the delivery of new releases of three separate products, including TD/OMS, its lifecycle management tools for IBM i; Gravity, its workflow management system for multiple systems; API Studio, which helps IBM i shops develop and manage API connections to existing software.

  TD/OMS, which is Remain Software’s flagship offering, is an application lifecycle management (ALM) tool for IBM i developers. The core of the offering is the Object Management System (OMS), which guides users through the process of defining applications and their associated objects, while additional modules provide more targeted functionality for reporting, impact analysis, …

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• Jenkins Gets Closer IBM i Hooks, Courtesy Of ARCAD

  September 14, 2020 Alex Woodie

  For some time, IBM i shops have been behind the curve when it comes to using modern DevOps and continuous integration/continuous delivery (CI/CD) technologies and techniques. ARCAD Software has been working to close that gap through its work with Git and Jenkins, and thanks to its new integration with an enterprise version of Jenkins from CloudBees, the gap is pretty much closed — at least from a technology point of view.

  Jenkins, if you don’t know yet, is a popular open source project that allows DevOps professionals to build, test, and deploy their software as part of a CI/CD …

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• ILEditor 2 Gives IBM i Shops A New Development Option

  May 6, 2020 Alex Woodie

  Liam Allan recently unveiled ILEditor 2, a new integrated development environment (IDE) for IBM i. The new IDE sports a fresher look and better performance compared to the first version of ILEditor, as well as an extensible plug-in system, which should also deliver better code coverage.

  For many years, members of the IBM i community have expressed frustration by the high price, size, and performance of Rational Developer for i (RDi), which is IBM’s flagship development tool for the IBM i community. While the IDE’s performance has improved in recent years, members of the community still bemoan the …

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• Here’s What’s In the Latest IBM i Technology Refreshes

  April 15, 2020 Alex Woodie

  As expected, IBM today officially unveiled its spring Technology Refreshes for IBM i. Among the goodies that will become available for IBM i 7.4 TR2 or IBM i 7.3 TR8 (or both) are enhancements to Db2 Mirror, a new approach to tape library virtualization, improvements to open source, and new features and functionality around Db2, RPG, RDi, and security, too.

  Months ago, IBM execs circled April 14 on their calendars as the day for the big IBM 7.4 TR2 and IBM i 7.3 TR8 reveal, with the idea that the following week’s POWERUp conference in Atlanta, Georgia (now canceled, but …

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• IBM i Can Thrive Under New CEO, Arvind Krishna

  April 8, 2020 Alex Woodie

  Arvind Krishna took the reins as CEO of IBM on Monday, marking the changing of the guard at one of this country’s foremost tech firms. But this is no ordinary switch, as Krishna must immediately navigate IBM through an extraordinary crisis that combines technological and social upheaval along with a new business climate. If given the proper attention, the IBM i platform has the chance to shine.

  A new IBM CEO is a momentous event in and of itself. Since Thomas Watson founded the company in 1914, there have been only nine other CEOs at the Armonk, New York, company …

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