• HCL Certifies Domino 11 on IBM i/Power

  August 5, 2020 Alex Woodie

  Domino 11 officially shipped in late 2019 by HCL Technologies, the company selected by IBM to continue development of the Domino family of products in 2017. Last month, the company announced that Domino 11 running on IBM i has been certified on select Power9 servers. Among the new capabilities that it brings is the new low-code Volt environment.

  The Domino family of products, including Notes, Sametime, Connections, and Traveler, has been through quite a bit over the past few years. After nearly a decade of neglect by IBM, HCL Tech made the development of Domino 10 a priority for the …

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• Kisco Extends Two Factor Authentication To Green Screens

  July 27, 2020 Alex Woodie

  Companies that still rely on 5250 greenscreens to get work done can now lock down those sessions with a new two-factor authentication feature recently delivered in Kisco Information Systems’ i2Pass offering. The New York company is also giving customers of its iEventMonitor solution new capabilities to automatically respond to error messages in a remote fashion.

  Green screens, if you haven’t noticed, are not going away. Despite the ubiquity of Web and mobile interfaces for new development, there’s a large number of applications that require users to log into a 5250 terminal emulation session to get the job done. For companies …

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• Idera Bolsters Visual LANSA 15

  May 13, 2020 Alex Woodie

  Idera last month issued the first major announcement for its LANSA product lineup since it bought the application development toolmaker last year. With Visual LANSA 15, the company has delivered more than 500 enhancements, including a new API creation experience, native chart controls for Web apps, and a host of sample apps, among many other new features.

  Before LANSA sold itself to Idera in January 2019, Visual LANSA was the company’s flagship integrated development environment (IDE) for creating modern graphical applications that run on IBM i, Windows, and cloud platforms.

  While Visual LANSA users can get down and dirty …

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• NGS Breaks Scalability Barrier With OLAP Client

  February 10, 2020 Alex Woodie

  New Generation Software is putting the finishing touches on an overhaul of its OLAP client, called QPort SmartView, that it says removes limitations on the amount of data IBM i shops can analyze. The Windows program gives users the ease of use and flexibility of Excel on the front-end, but utilizes the scalability and OLAP processing heft of IBM i on the backend to analyze substantially larger data volumes.

  Typically, New Generation Software plays it down the middle when it comes to business intelligence and analytics on the IBM i platform. On the one hand, the company’s predominantly midsize clientele …

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• Guru Classic: A Bevy Of BIFs — Updates

  February 5, 2020 Jon Paris

  In my previous tip I returned to the “Bevy” series to tell you about the latest addition to the family: %ScanRpl. Shortly after completing that tip I realized that there have been a number of more recent BIFs such as %SubArr and some enhancements to existing BIFs like %Trimx that seem to have escaped people’s notice. In this tip I attempt to fill those omissions.

  %Trim: Specify Characters to Trim

  Let’s start with a BIF that hopefully you are all familiar with: %Trim. Before going any further I should point out that when I say %Trim, I am referring to …

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• Thoroughly Modern: More Than Just A Pretty Face

  December 9, 2019 Greg Patterson and Mike Pavlak

  The most difficult, thorny, and intractable problems can sometimes be effectively addressed, if not outright fixed, by breaking them down into smaller problems that can be addressed tactically while also hewing to a broader and deeper strategic plan.

  That, in a nutshell, is the issue facing most IBM i shops that have not done much application modernization above and beyond pushing the display part of the code to a 5250 green screen emulator or maybe doing a little screen scraping to gussy it up a little bit. The reality is there are still an awful lot of IBM i shops …

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• Digging Into the Latest IBM i TRs

  October 23, 2019 Alex Woodie

  The fall batch of Technology Refreshes (TRs) have been revealed, and as expected, there’s a bit of new functionality available for customers who use IBM i 7.3 and 7.4. In this story, we’ll tackle enhancements in open source, systems management and monitoring, and development, which means we’ll dive deeper into other areas, like database and HA/DR, in a future story.

  Let’s start with the fun stuff: open source. With IBM i 7.3 TR7 and 7.4 TR1, IBM has brought support for two prominent open source projects, including ZeroMQ and Redis.

  ZeroMQ is a universal messaging library that allows users to …

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• ARCAD Unveils GUI Modernization Tool

  September 25, 2019 Alex Woodie

  ARCAD Software is getting deeper into the application modernization business with the launch of iNow, a new tool designed to help IBM i users create compelling graphical user interfaces (GUI) that run across Windows, Web, and mobile form factors. The new offering, which is based on Microsoft .NET and utilizes Remote Desktop Protocol (RDP) technology, is being sold as part of a new suite called ARCAD for IBM i Modernization.

  IBM i shops have been adapting their applications to Windows interfaces for the better part of 30 years, to the Web for about 20 years, and to mobile interfaces for …

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• Fresche Hires Database Modernization Expert

  September 11, 2019 Alex Woodie

  IBM i database modernization expert Birgitta Hauser has a new software house to call home following her hiring at Fresche Solutions. The new gig marks the start of a new era in the German’s 20-year career on the IBM i, and adds to Fresche’s growing arsenal of midrange talent.

  IBM i shops around the world are under pressure to either modernize their systems or migrate to something newer. While IBM i applications largely do what they were designed to do, the requirements have changed, and the siren call of digital transformation and big data analytics is too hard for …

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• Guru Classic: The Efficiency of Varying Length Character Variables

  August 14, 2019 Jon Paris

  Remember the bad old days when dinosaurs still roamed the earth and the only way to build strings in RPG involved playing silly games with arrays? Or worse still, obscure combinations of MOVE operations? Thankfully those days are far behind us — although sadly there are still a few RPG/400 dinosaurs coding away!

  RPG IV introduced many powerful new string handling options, such as the %TRIMx family of BIFs, but even now there are capabilities in the language that few programmers fully exploit. One of my favorites is variable length fields. This lack of familiarity made this tip an obvious …

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