• IBM Delivered An RDi Update, Too

  November 4, 2020 Alex Woodie

  Next week, IBM is planning to deliver the PTFs that include the functionality contained in the Technology Refreshes it just unveiled for IBM i 7.3 and 7.4 last month. You will want to stay on the lookout for those updates. But some of the capabilities that IBM “announced” in the TRs shipped months ago, including those for Rational Developer for i (RDi).

  The latest release of RDi, or version 9.6.0.8, was included as a feature for IBM i 7.3 TR9 and IBM i 7.4 TR4. IBM, of course, announced those TRs on October 6 and says it plans to …

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• Tech Refresh Brings New RPG Features

  October 26, 2020 Alex Woodie

  There’s no denying that IBM has a soft spot for open source these days, but that doesn’t mean it’s given up on the ILE environment. In fact, IBM gave RPG programmers something to cheer about by including several new features in the language in the latest batch of Technology Refreshes.

  IBM introduced over a dozen new open source capabilities with the IBM i 7.3 TR9 and 7.4 TR3, which IBM unveiled earlier this month and which will ship in a few weeks. That new tech will definitely help IBM i shops tackle their business challenges, says Steve Will, the chief …

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• Guru: Dynamic Arrays Come To RPG – Limitations, Circumventions, And More

  October 12, 2020 Jon Paris

  In my first two tips in this series I covered the basics of automatic sizing arrays and variable sized arrays. In this final part am going to discuss some of the current limitations in this support and the facilities IBM has put in place to help circumvent them.

  IBM publishes an extensive list of the limitations, but in normal usage only a couple present “real” restrictions in practical terms. If you are curious though, you can find the full list here.

  Limitations

  The first limitation to bear in mind is that, currently, only top-level variables can be defined …

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• i2Rest Offers Native API Alternative to IWS

  August 19, 2020 Alex Woodie

  IBM i shops that want to expose their RPG applications as industry standard Web services have a few options to choose from. One solution they should keep on their list is i2Rest, which is a native ILE application that exposes RPG using modern OAuth2 and OpenAPI standards.

  We first came across Alexei Baranov’s work back in 2012, when he was involved in the port of the SVN client to IBM i while working at a Moscow, Russia-based consulting firm. Soon thereafter, Baranov started working on developing Web services tools for IBM i.

  The first version of his new Web …

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• IBM Wheels And Deals With Solution Edition Booster Pack

  June 8, 2020 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  A few weeks ago, we told you about the double memory and double I/O request for price quote (RPQ) special deals that IBM quietly rolled out in April without putting out any announcement letters and that are still in effect until June 30. So consider this a reminder that these deals are still out there and now is a good time to invest in new Power9 iron if you want to pay less for it than you otherwise might.

  But that is not all you can get. As it turns out, Big Blue is revamping its IBM i Solution Edition …

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• Guru: Graphical Debugging Through ACS

  June 8, 2020 Ted Holt

  ACS (IBM i Access Client Solutions) keeps getting better and better. I can’t stay up-to-date with the latest releases of all the software I use, but I do everything I can to keep up-to-date with ACS. One of the handiest of the relatively most recent releases is the ability to access IBM i Debugger through Run SQL Scripts. If you haven’t tried IBM i Debugger, you’re missing out.

  IBM i Debugger (a.k.a. System Debugger) is part of the IBM Toolkit for Java. It’s graphical, and it makes the green-screen debugger (STRDBG) look like something built by cavemen. To show you …

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• Welcome To The ‘Riehl’ World: Live, Hands-On IBM i Training

  May 18, 2020 Alex Woodie

  IBM i shops don’t have a ton of options available when it comes to online IBM i education these days. If you’re in the market to improve your skills, one of the outfits that should be on your shortlist is The 400 School, which is one of the few places left that offers hands-on IBM i education, according to the company’s founder and president, Dan Riehl.

  Riehl has had the kind of IBM midrange career that younger folks arriving on the platform today can only dream of. He has founded companies, written books, worked as a security consultant and …

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• What’s New In Open Source With The Latest TRs

  April 27, 2020 Alex Woodie

  New technology is exciting. And when it can help you run your business more profitably or efficiently, well, it becomes very exciting. With IBM i, the open source community is arguably the biggest contributor of new technology to the platform. IT Jungle recently checked in Jesse Gorzinski, the IBM i open source architect, to hear how the open source story has improved with the recent technology refreshes.

  Arguably the biggest open source-related enhancement with IBM i 7.4 TR2 and 7.3 TR8 revolves around a change in RPM, the new delivery method that IBM adopted two years ago to distribute new …

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• Guru: Practicing Safe Hex in RPG

  March 2, 2020 Jon Paris

  In this tip I’m going to address a question that arises regularly on RPG-oriented Internet lists, namely: “Is there an easy way to convert a character string to its hexadecimal equivalent?”

  One answer, of course, would be to write your own routine using lookup tables, but there is a far easier way. We can take advantage of the system’s hex MI APIs. These were originally surfaced for use by C and C++ but, thanks to the joys of ILE, can be used by any ILE language. Not only that, RPG’s prototyping support makes them really easy to use. In fact, …

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• Guru: End Of Year Feedback

  December 2, 2019 Ted Holt

  The year has flown by. Before we know it, it will be 2020. The century is flying by, too. We’ve almost consumed a fifth of it. That seems like a good excuse to see what we might glean from some of your feedback. It’s been a while. More to come next week!

  Several readers wrote regarding the need to remove hard-coded values from programs. Jim brought up the problem of compile-time tables and arrays.

  I find cases where data is hard coded (state names, product categories are a few examples) for tables or arrays in dozens of programs.

  I wish …

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