• Power Systems Keeps Growing Against A Tough Compare

  July 22, 2019 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  This time last year, Big Blue was just starting to ship Power9-based systems for the “Summit” and “Sierra” supercomputers built for the U.S. Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory and Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, and that gave the Power Systems line a revenue bump through the third and fourth quarters of last year. There is no such big deal this year, although IBM has sold a baby version of these machines – if you consider the 25 petaflops “Pangea III” supercomputer small – to European oil and gas giant Total.

  That deal with Total surely helped IBM make its …

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• Cloud ERP for Less than $400 Per Month? Now There’s a Concept

  July 22, 2019 Alex Woodie

  What do you call a full-fledged ERP system running on a private IBM i cloud that costs less than $400 per month for three users? If you’re Software Concepts – the Massachusetts-based ERP vendor behind the bold new deal – you might call it just what the IBM i ecosystem needed.

  The IBM midrange server has always been something of an enigma in the IT business. Tucked between the giant mainframes running Fortune 100 outfits and the PCs favored by one-man shops, the AS/400 and its progeny have catered to midsized organizations that demand advanced business functionality, but not the …

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• Guru: How Thorough Was Your Last Test? RDi Code Coverage Can Tell You

  July 22, 2019 Susan Gantner

  When you’ve made changes to one or more programs, you test all the changes – right? And, of course, you also test all the rest of the code just to make sure you didn’t break anything else. Did you do that with your last set of changes? Did you test ALL the code? Enabling you to answer that last question is what RDi’s Code Coverage facility is all about.

  This is an introduction to Code Coverage — the basics of both why and how to use it. Before I go into how to run it, it may pique your interest …

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• Four Hundred Monitor, July 22

  July 22, 2019 Jenny Thomas

  Sometimes it’s a good idea to toot your own horn. But before you dust off your passé paper resume to add to your latest accomplishments, you might want to take a look at the new rage: digital badges. You may have noticed these badges popping up on your Twitter feed if you follow and of our 2019 IBM i champions, but there are many more badges available for all sorts of IBM-related skills. In our Top Story below you can find a link to Acclaim, a site that works with vendors, including IBM, to verify talent through digital credentials representing …

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• IBM i PTF Guide, Volume 21, Number 29

  July 22, 2019 Doug Bidwell

  We pay attention to bugs and fixes for the IBM i platform here at the IBM i PTF Guide, and we saw some information in Big Blue’s support databases about APARs – short for Authorized Program Analysis Reports – which is an official response from IBM when customers report a problem with a system or find a suspected defect. Not all APARs get PTFs or permanent fixes in subsequent releases, but many, of course, do.

  Here is the interesting set of statistics, which has the number of APARs by operating system release level:

  • 19,392 on V7R1
  • 11,383 on V7R2
  • 7,182

  …

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• Guru Classic: My Favorite Keyboard Shortcuts for RSE/RDi

  July 17, 2019 Susan Gantner

  When using RDi for editing my CL, DDS, RPG, or COBOL code, I find that I can save a lot of time by using keyboard shortcuts for functions that would otherwise require that I take my hands off the keyboard to use the mouse. So I thought I would share a few of my favorites. Many of the shortcuts I use are standard for other applications that I also use for email, spreadsheets or text editing. It’s easy to forget that some of those same shortcuts can be used when we’re editing our RPG code.

  A lot has changed on …

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• Guru Classic: The New Basics — Indicators

  July 17, 2019 Jon Paris

  The history of indicators pre-dates even the earliest versions of RPG and takes us all the way back to the old tabulating machines, perhaps even earlier depending on how broad a definition one uses. What is without doubt, though, is that indicators in the sense of *INnn and *INLR were added to the RPG language as a vehicle for translating those old tabulator board programs.

  RPG has grown a lot since those early days, and yet many people still write code using the old-style numbered indicators. LR? Well, we’re kind of stuck with that, but there hasn’t been a need …

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• Guru Classic: Looking For Commitment, Part 2

  July 17, 2019 Paul Tuohy

  As companies look to modernize their applications, commitment control can play an integral role. This set of three articles was originally published in March 2009. The content of the articles has been updated for free form RPG.

  In this article I will take a look at the basic rules and coding requirements for using commitment control within RPG programs.

  A Database

  This is the SQL used to create a schema named COMMIT, which contains two related tables called HEADER and DETAILS.

  (A)  CREATE SCHEMA "COMMIT" ;
  
  (B)  CREATE TABLE COMMIT/HEADER (
       	"KEY" CHAR(2) CCSID 37 NOT NULL DEFAULT '' ,
       	

  …

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• IBM Takes A Hands Off Approach With Red Hat

  July 15, 2019 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  IBM has been around long enough in the IT racket that it doesn’t have any trouble maintaining distinct portfolios of products that have overlapping and often incompatible functions. The System/3, which debuted in 1969, is only five years younger than the System/360, which laid the foundation and set the pace for corporate computing when it launched in 1964. Both styles of machines continue to exist today as the IBM i on Power Systems platform and the System z.

  With the $34 billion acquisition of Red Hat, which closed last week, neither of those two legacy products are under threat and …

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• Remain Breaks New Ground With ALM Suite

  July 15, 2019 Alex Woodie

  Coding season just ended for Remain Software, the Dutch application lifecycle management (ALM) vendor with a growing US presence. That means customers are sorting through a torrent of new functionality in its flagship TD/OMS product, including improved hooks to DevOps tools like Git and Jenkins, a new cross-platform cross-reference module, and a nifty API generator too.

  New stuff started emerging from Remain Software around the POWERUp conference in May, when IT Jungle sat down with company representatives to talk about development trends, current and upcoming releases of Remain’s software, and what customers are looking to get next.

  Arguably the biggest …

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