• After A Few Short Years, VS Code Passes Rational Developer for i

  February 23, 2026 Alex Woodie

  It has finally happened: Visual Studio Code has passed Rational Developer for i in usage, according to the 2026 version of Fortra’s IBM i Marketplace Survey. The survey also shows lower adoption of greenscreen ADTS and increased use of DevOps tools, demonstrating some positive trends in IBM i application development.

  It’s been barely two years since Fortra started asking IBM i customers about their use of Visual Studio Code, the free, Web-based integrated development environment (IDE) originally developed by Microsoft and set free as an open source project in November 2015. The 2024 survey (which was conducted in late 2023) …

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• Profound Says New Agentic AI Dev Tool Delivers Huge Productivity Boost

  January 19, 2026 Alex Woodie

  Profound Logic is rolling out a new AI-powered development tool that it says will increase the productivity of individual developers by five to 10 times. Dubbed CoderFlow, the software coordinates the work of multiple AI agents to assist with the development new IBM i applications or the maintenance and modernization of existing ones.

  Existing AI copilots provide some productivity gains for developers working in an IDE, somewhere around 20 percent, according to Profound Logic chief executive officer Alex Roytman. But CoderFlow is a different type of product. It is not a coding co-pilot, he said. Instead it is a framework …

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• Rocket Delivers More DevOps Capabilities For IBM i

  November 17, 2025 Alex Woodie

  Rocket Software recently put the finishing touches on a range of updates for Rocket DevOps, its suite of automation, change management, and testing solutions for IBM i. The top enhancements customers will find are two-way Git integration, AI-powered anomaly detection, unit testing enhancements, and support for IBM i DevOps workflows in Microsoft Azure Pipelines.

  It’s been a 2.5 years now that Rocket Software completed the rebrand from the old Aldon change management products, which it obtained with its 2011 acquisition, to Rocket DevOps. That Rocket DevOps rebrand involved taking the old Aldon Lifecycle Manager products – which helped automate …

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• Tool Aims To Streamline Git Integration For Old School IBM i Devs

  August 18, 2025 Alex Woodie

  There’s one school of thought that says IBM i developers should embrace the DevOps revolution and start using mainstream tools like Git and Jira for managing and deploying code. But there’s also a pool of old school programmers who are reluctant to give up their established ways and means. Richard Schoen hopes to bring these worlds together with an update to the iForGit tool from his company MobiGoGo’s that streamlines Git integration for old school IBM i devs who still use PDM and SEU.

  Schoen launched his iForGit tool about seven years ago to provide some degree of Git integration …

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• VS Code Will Be The Heart Of The Modern IBM i Platform

  June 23, 2025 Sebastien Julliand

  For application programmers, the workspace is not a place to sit with a screen, a keyboard, a chair, but rather is an integrated development environment within which code can be created, shared, compiled, and managed either inside the tool itself or through plug-in extensions that link it to other tools. IDEs have been around for decades and are not anything new. What is new is how suddenly popular one particular IDE – VS Code – has become.

  For the past several years, nearly three quarters of the programmers in the world polled for the Stack Overflow Developer Survey say that …

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• MDNA Speeds Up Git Transactions In Big IBM i Environments

  February 24, 2025 Alex Woodie

  With the latest release of its change management software for IBM i, Midrange Dynamics North America (MDNA) has addressed a thorny issue impacting the use of Git in large IBM i environments. The company also enhanced how it handles custom IBM i definitions in Git environments.

  The use of Git to manage source code has nearly doubled in the IBM i community over the past five years, according to Fortra’s IBM i Marketplace Study, growing to 30 percent in the most recent survey. That indicates a strong push to adopt DevOps technologies and techniques, which is a good thing …

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• What Do IBM i Shops Use To Write Applications These Days?

  February 3, 2025 Alex Woodie

  When it comes to languages and tools for developing applications on IBM i, there are a ton of options available for customers. Thanks to the PASE runtime, a variety of open source languages and runtimes have been brought to the platform, not to mention the time-tested ILE technologies from IBM. But what do IBM i shops actually use to write new apps? For answers, we look to Fortra’s 2025 IBM i Marketplace Survey results.

  Fortra recently released the results for the 11th installment of its IBM i Marketplace Survey, which is based on surveys it conducted in late 2025 …

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• How To Have The Wisdom Of Experts Woven Into Your Code

  October 14, 2024 Nicholas DeLessio

  No matter how far you are down the road with your DevOps automation journey, or even if you’re not yet starting that journey, it’s probably a good idea to have a code checker; not everyone can have a Linus Torvalds review their work (as famously happens with the open source Linux kernel), but there are automation tools available for various languages and platforms that do static code analysis and they are the next best thing.

  These tools, sometimes called “code linters” (because they remove the fuzzy bits out of application logic like actual linters remove imperfections stuck to our clothing), …

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• The Many Faces Of IT Modernization

  October 7, 2024 Alex Woodie

  The clarion call of modernization has been heard loud and clear among IBM i and System z shops for decades. Old IT is hampering your competitiveness, they’re told, and something must be done about it. In reality, there’s no single path to modernization, which is a multi-faceted phenomenon that can have wide ranging impacts on the business, Rocket Software says in a new report.

  Business transformation is separate from IT transformation, but the two are linked, according to Rocket Software’s new study, titled IT Modernization Without Disruption, which is based on a survey of 309 decision-maker at System …

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• IBM Banking on Merlin 2.0 to Goose Modern Development on IBM i

  June 19, 2024 Alex Woodie

  IBM last week shipped most of the new stuff unveiled in the Spring Technology Refreshes, which includes Merlin 2.0, the Web-based application development and modernization environment for IBM i. Big Blue is betting that the new and improved offering will encourage IBM i shops to (finally) begin their journey toward truly modern coding techniques.

  Friday, June 14 marked the start of general availability for the majority of the features IBM is including in IBM i 7.5 TR4 and IBM i 7.4 TR10, which it announced on May 8. The version 2.0 release of Merlin – whose official IBM name …

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