• What Do IBM i Shops Use To Write Applications These Days?

  February 3, 2025 Alex Woodie

  When it comes to languages and tools for developing applications on IBM i, there are a ton of options available for customers. Thanks to the PASE runtime, a variety of open source languages and runtimes have been brought to the platform, not to mention the time-tested ILE technologies from IBM. But what do IBM i shops actually use to write new apps? For answers, we look to Fortra’s 2025 IBM i Marketplace Survey results.

  Fortra recently released the results for the 11th installment of its IBM i Marketplace Survey, which is based on surveys it conducted in late 2025 …

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• IBM Announcement Roundup: A Little Bit Of Everything

  January 13, 2025 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Welcome to 2025, everybody. Nothing too big has happened on the IBM i front as far as we know, excepting the appointment of a new vice president for product management for the Power Systems line, which we report on elsewhere in this issue. But a lot of little thing have happened in recent weeks that bear pointing out, including a whole lot of patching that you can get caught up on in the IBM i PTF Guide also elsewhere in this issue.

  Let’s go through the IBM announcements relative to the Power Systems and IBM i customer base that we …

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• Stop Coding In C and C++, Feds Say

  December 2, 2024 Alex Woodie

  Two federal agencies asked the IT world last month to stop developing applications in memory unsafe languages like C and C++ and to come up with roadmaps to migrate existing apps. While the security alert is unlikely to have a major impact on IBM i application development, the C family of languages does have a presence on the IBM midrange server that will be very tough to remove.

  Organizations should immediately stop developing new applications written in memory unsafe languages like C and C++, the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) and the Federal Bureau of Investigations (FBI) warned last …

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• IBM’s Fall 2024 Code for IBM i Enhancements

  November 13, 2024 Alex Woodie

  Adoption of Code for i continues to soar among IBM i developers, as they shift from heavy, expensive integrated development environments (IDEs) to lighter, open-source options. With the latest Technology Refreshes (TRs) for IBM i, IBM is making the VS Code plug-in even more useful for RPG and COBOL developers.

  Code for IBM i is the brainchild of Liam Allan, the midrange wunderkind with an intense aversion to Rational Developer for IBM i (RDi), IBM’s Java-based flagship IDE for IBM i. As adoption of the VS Code extension grew in the summer of 2022, IBM smartly hired Allan as a …

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• Fresche Nabs Redbourn Business Systems For Synon Expertise

  November 11, 2024 Alex Woodie

  Fresche Solutions last week acquired Redbourn Business Systems, a UK-based provider of Synon and CA 2E development and consulting services. The move bolsters Fresche’s previous efforts to cater to the needs of IBM i shops that adopted the Synon/2E development language, and also bolsters the company’s European presence.

  Redbourn Business Systems was founded in 1994 by Steve Cast, a longtime RPG programmer and IBM midrange professional who was among the first to port applications from the System/38 to the AS/400 back in the 1980s. The company, which is based in the English village of Redbourn, provides a range of services …

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• Another GenAI-Powered Testing Tool Comes to IBM i

  November 6, 2024 Alex Woodie

  IBM says it’s bringing a new AI accelerator to the Power line to drive compute-hungry generative AI workloads, such as the new RPG coding assistant that it’s also developing. But IBM won’t be the only source of such GenAI-powered coding assistants, as a company called Abstracta recently announced another one.

  There’s a lot of interest in the Spyre accelerators that IBM announced earlier this year for the System z mainframe and which IBM announced last month during its TechExchange conference will be coming to Power. Considering the massive demand for Nvidia GPUs, which could plug into past generations of Power …

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• IBM Working On Making Enterprise Java Easier

  October 21, 2024 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Java is important in the enterprise, and getting more important, and IBM wants to help make managing and using Java easier.

  At this time last year, there were 26.3 million application developers in the world, and according to CodeNinja, about 20 million of them were reasonably fluent in JavaScript, nearly double the number six years ago. (We are not sure if CodeNinja is counting Node.js as a variant of JavaScript, as it probably should.)

  Java, a much older cross-platform language and the lingua franca of business logic in the enterprise, is not as large but is seeing a bit …

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• How To Have The Wisdom Of Experts Woven Into Your Code

  October 14, 2024 Nicholas DeLessio

  No matter how far you are down the road with your DevOps automation journey, or even if you’re not yet starting that journey, it’s probably a good idea to have a code checker; not everyone can have a Linus Torvalds review their work (as famously happens with the open source Linux kernel), but there are automation tools available for various languages and platforms that do static code analysis and they are the next best thing.

  These tools, sometimes called “code linters” (because they remove the fuzzy bits out of application logic like actual linters remove imperfections stuck to our clothing), …

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• Thoroughly Modern: Why Now Is The Time To Transform Your RPG/COBOL To Modern Languages

  October 7, 2024 Chris Koppe

  RPG and COBOL run some of the most important systems in business. But while your competitors release new products and features in weeks, you wait for months. That lag time is a silent threat – one that slowly erodes your competitive edge.

  Every hour spent waiting for an update, every feature delayed, is a lost opportunity. Your systems – once considered state-of-the-art – are now rigid, slow to evolve, and difficult to integrate with new technologies. While RPG/COBOL still power critical operations, they no longer support the speed and flexibility required for today’s business. The world moves faster now, and …

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• Summer of IBM i Vulnerabilities

  September 18, 2024 Alex Woodie

  IBM has patched more than two dozen software vulnerabilities in the IBM i stack over the past few months, including flaws in Merlin, MQ, OpenSSH, the Java stack, Db2, Performance Tools, and the HTTP Server (the one powered by Apache). Nine of the security vulnerabilities carry CVSS Base scores of 7 or higher, while one is above 8, making these serious security threats. If you haven’t applied the patches yet, you’re encouraged to do it soon.

  Working backwards from the most recent security bulletins, we start with September 5, when IBM issued patches for three vulnerabilities in Merlin, which officially …

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