• 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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• iSphere Upgrade Bolsters RDi Even More

  November 7, 2018 Alex Woodie

  When it comes to IBM i programming tools from IBM, Rational Developer for IBM i (RDi) is the integrated development environment at the top of many professionals’ wish lists. However, the IDE’s functionality is lacking a few departments, which provides an opportunity for innovation in the community, as IBM originally envisioned. One of the projects that’s been running with the ball is the popular iSphere project, which recently unveiled a new release.

  iSphere is a free plug-in for RDi and WDSC that was first released by Frank Hildebrandt of Task Force IT-Consulting back in 2013. The original idea behind the …

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• Serving Up Fast, Fresche Interfaces for IBM i

  October 31, 2018 Alex Woodie

  “Time is money,” as Benjamin Franklin once said. With enough of either, IBM i shops could accomplish all of their modernization goals. But of course, both time and money are limited, which is why tactical tools like the Presto modernization tool from Fresche are gaining traction.

  Fresche’s Presto is an IBM i modernization tool that takes 5250 output from applications and converts it on the fly into HTML that can be rendered in a standard Web browser. The software can also work with the RPG Open Access handler from IBM to power GUIs that have RPG-based back ends but …

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• SystemObjects SmartPad4i Mobilizes RDi

  April 3, 2017 Dan Burger

  As more companies find their way into the RDi development environment, more ISVs realize plug-ins to RDi are in demand. SystemObjects just joined the list by offering an RDi plug-in to its Web and mobile application development tool known as SmartPad4i. For situations where Web development skills are still evolving, SystemObjects is offering a route that bypasses the Java and HTML learning curve. And there are always RPG and COBOL programmers who don’t mind that detour.

  SmartPad4i is not new. But the plug-in to RDi and the built-in capability to create HTML files are interesting enhancements. IBM i developers with …

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