• How GraphQL Can Improve IBM i APIs

  March 9, 2020 Alex Woodie

  IBM i shops are embracing APIs as a method for accessing data and programs, just like the wider IT world. As RESTful Web services overtook SOAP-based ones in popularity, IBM i shops moved with them. Now a new approach to Web services, dubbed GraphQL, is gaining traction in the wider IT world, and leading IBM i developers are right there again.

  GraphQL, if you’re not familiar, is a relatively new language and runtime for exposing and consuming APIs. The software, which was originally developed in 2015 by Facebook to streamline delivery of content in complex environments, essentially provides an abstraction …

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• Guru Classic: More iSphere Goodies

  March 4, 2020 Susan Gantner

  This Guru Classic tip is my third in a series exploring the iSphere RDi plug-in. In this tip I’ll cover two additional ways in which iSphere expands the RDi toolset. There are a few details that I’ve updated in this new version of the tip due to updates in either RDi or the iSphere tool itself. Plus I have added an additional tip based on how I’ve seen one of these features utilized.

  Binding Directory Editor

  I’ve long been baffled at the lack of support in RDi for binding directories; it seems like something modern developers certainly use. In the …

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• Guru Classic: Tuning SQL Environments On i

  March 4, 2020 Paul Tuohy

  Author’s Note: This article was originally published in November 2015. This was one of the first DB2 for i Services that I used in anger. I have used a lot since.

  One of the frustrating things about being a speaker at conferences is that when you want to attend another session with a topic that piques your interest, it invariably clashes with when you are speaking. But every now and again, the scheduling gods work in your favor. Such was the case when I spoke at the excellent International i-Power 2015 conference at Wyboston Lakes Executive Centre in the UK. …

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• Why Koch Is Buying the Rest of Infor

  February 12, 2020 Alex Woodie

  Koch Equity Development last week announced that it has bought the remaining shares of Infor that it didn’t previously own. The move puts Koch Industries in charge of the world’s third largest ERP software company, and the IBM i market’s biggest vendor. But what, exactly, drove the $110-billion industrial conglomerate into making such an investment is the subject of some speculation.

  Infor, which has been flirting with an IPO for years, appeared to be on the fast-track for a Wall Street listing in January 2019, when it raised $1.5 billion in what, ostensibly, would be the last private equity …

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• IBM i PTF Guide, Volume 22, Number 5

  February 3, 2020 Doug Bidwell

  Another day, another dollar. Another week, another batch of PTF patches for the IBM i stack.

  So here is what has gone down. There are multiple vulnerabilities in the IBM Java SDK and the IBM Java Runtime that affect the IBM i platform. Fixes for the vulnerabilities are contained in current Java PTF group for all four releases. IBM recommends that all users running unsupported versions of affected products upgrade to supported and fixed versions of affected products.

  Here is the rundown of the patches this week, by release.

  PTF Groups 7.4:

  • HIPERs (High Impact/Pervasive)
  • SAP Support Required PTF List

  …

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• Thoroughly Modern: Taking The Pulse Of IBM i Developers

  January 22, 2020 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  (Sponsored Content) It takes someone who has experience in application development to create and sell tools that help make a developer’s job easier. We think about the tool creators, but when it comes to getting people to adopt a new technology, the technical sales team at any software company is the bridge that connects developers of tools to the developer of applications who can be helped by those tools. In this edition of Thoroughly Modern, we are talking with Stephen Flaherty, a technical engineer at Fresche Solutions, about what IBM i developers are thinking about and doing …

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• Industry Speaks: IBM i Predictions For 2020, Part 2

  January 22, 2020 Alex Woodie

  What will happen in the IBM i community in 2020? It’s a question that’s worth some speculation, particularly from members of the IBM i community who have given it some thought. Here is our second (and final) batch of community predictions for 2020.

  The IBM i platform has been chugging along for 32 years (or 40 if you count the S/38). Do you really think this will be the year that it goes kaput? Trevor Perry certainly doesn’t think so, and you probably shouldn’t, either.

  “There will be continued predictions of the demise of IBM i throughout 2020,” the IBM …

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• Thoroughly Modern: More Than Just A Pretty Face

  December 9, 2019 Greg Patterson and Mike Pavlak

  (Sponsored Content) 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 …

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• Samba Patch Caps Busy Year for IBM i Security

  December 4, 2019 Alex Woodie

  IBM last week patched a moderately severe security flaw in IBM i’s Samba implementation that could enable hackers to access data they really shouldn’t be able to access. The disclosure caps a rather busy second half of the year for security patches on IBM i that saw 26 emergency PTFs and Yum updates for Node.js, Python, the Apache HTTP Server, OpenSSL, ISC Bind, IBM Navigator, and even Db2 Mirror for IBM i.

  On November 26, IBM issued this security bulletin to let people know about the new flaw in the Samba client. The flaw could allow a hacker to not …

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• Microsoft Wants to Migrate Your IBM i Code to Azure

  November 13, 2019 Alex Woodie

  Microsoft is executing a plan with its partner Skytap to bring IBM i into its Azure cloud, as we’ve previously told you about. But another group within the technology giant has plans of its own to migrate IBM i applications to languages that can run natively on X86 servers and integrate more easily with Azure services.

  We caught wind of this group’s code migration plan a month ago when one of the technical specialists in the Microsoft Azure Global Customer Advisory Team (CAT) wrote a blog entry about the work they do. IT Jungle followed up with the IBM i …

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