• Transferring Low Code Benefits Into The IBM i

  September 22, 2021 Eugene King

  As with fashion, there are trends in the IT industry and history tends to repeat itself in several exciting ways.  Development languages come into fashion, run their course, and then become obsolete. Then, they may be revamped with the addition of new criteria and frameworks.

  The low-code movement is not new but another iteration on traditional programming. Let’s do a brief history review.

  At first, computer programming involved specific machine code associated with a particular processor architecture.  Eventually, the language was slightly abstracted to facilitate second-generation assembler code, which was partially portable across architectures.

  The third-generation programming languages, also called …

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• IBM i Open Source Gets Better With Fall 2021 TRs

  September 20, 2021 Alex Woodie

  The open source community has become a big source of new software for the IBM i platform in recent years, if not the biggest contributor. To that end, the recent Technology Refreshes (TRs) for IBM i 7.3 and 7.4 bring a dozen or so new or updated packages to the platform.

  One of the most exciting additions to IBM i’s open source repertoire is tn5250, a bare-bones terminal emulator for accessing IBM i system and application screens. Distributed via Source Forge, tn5250 is a Windows program that enables users to access green screens from the Secure Shell (SSH) terminal. …

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• New Nav Puts SQL Services Within Reach

  September 15, 2021 Alex Woodie

  IBM delivered new Technology Refreshes (TRs) for IBM i 7.3 and 7.4 last week, and there’s a lot of good stuff in there. Arguably one of the biggest announcements is the overhaul of IBM i Navigator, which the folks at IBM have taken to calling “New Nav.” But what makes New Nav so special?

  IBM rewrote New Nav from the ground up in Angular, a JavaScript framework for building Web and mobile applications, and PrimeNG, a popular component library for Angular. The combination of these two technologies gives New Nav a fresh-looking interface that will appeal to users of all …

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• Eradani Drives Simplification with API Tool Update

  September 15, 2021 Alex Woodie

  Eradani has always sought to simplify the application programming interface (API) enablement process as much as possible for its IBM i customers. And with the launch of Eradani Connect version 4.1, which features a new GUI, pre-built templates of APIs, and a catalog for the REST-style Web services created with the tool, the Northern California company is taking the simplification mantra to new levels.

  The world is chock full of Web services. Whether it’s real-time weather data, a shipping services, an ecommerce application, or a tax calculator, somebody somewhere is providing information over the Internet. These external APIs generally are …

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• Modernize Your IBM i Using Other People’s Code

  September 8, 2021 Daniel Magid

  IBM i users are moving their applications to the leading edge quickly by connecting their RPG and COBOL code to the exploding number of publicly available APIs. In just the last few months here at Eradani, we have worked with customers who are providing the latest in shopping experiences by connecting their applications to Shopify, Wix, and Amazon. We have helped customers automate logistics and provide real time shipping information using APIs from UPS, USPS, Project44, Shipengine, and many others. Some of our finance industry companies are using APIs to get vehicle information and property information for loan documents and …

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• Profound Logic Speeds Up Mobile Client

  September 1, 2021 Alex Woodie

  Organizations that adopt the latest release of Profound Logic’s mobile client for iOS will find it runs significantly faster than older versions — up to 300 percent, the company says. An update to Apple’s newest Web browser rendering engine is the key behind the speedup in Profound UI Mobile Client version 2.8, the company says.

  Profound UI Mobile Client is a development tool and client runtime that enables organizations to create native iOS applications. It works with both Profound UI as a front-end for RPG applications (with integration handled via IBM’s RPG Open Access) as well as Profound.js, the …

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• GraphQL’s Emerging Role in Modernization of Monolithic Applications

  August 30, 2021 Alex Woodie

  Every now and then, a technology emerges that lifts up everything around it. GraphQL has the potential to be a technology like that, and that’s good news for customers running older, established applications, such as those that run on IBM iron.

  IBM’s mainframe and its midrange IBM i server often are maligned as old, washed-up, legacy platforms, but people who say that are missing a key distinction: it’s usually not the server that’s old. In most cases, it’s the application that was first deployed in the Clinton Administration (or earlier) that is the problem.

  Companies typically have many reasons for …

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• Calling All IBM i Platforms. . .

  August 16, 2021 Daniel Magid

  In a microservices world, all elements of what used to be monolithic application programs are now chunks of code linked to each other using any number of application programming interfaces, or APIs. Those APIs can be based on a remote procedure call, or RPC, architecture, which is a kind of generic distributed client/server approach, or the REST – short for representational state transfer – architecture favored by parts of the commercial Web software stack that has dramatically grown in popularity in the past two decades. Either way – and in fact, there are more than two ways – APIs are …

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• Domino 12 Comes To IBM i

  August 16, 2021 Alex Woodie

  HCL Technologies, which now owns the Lotus Notes and Domino family, started shipping Domino 12 two months ago. Surprisingly, the new version is now available on the IBM i platform, where a substantial number of companies still run Notes and Domino applications.

  Back in late 2017, you will remember, an agreement was struck between IBM and HCL Technologies regarding Notes and Domino, the groupware software that had languished on the Big Blue vine for years. HCL made development of Domino 10 a priority, and finally shipped the 10th edition of the product on IBM i in early 2019. …

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• Open Source Technology Stands On The Shoulders Of Legacy Applications

  May 3, 2021 Michael Killian

  From microservices to the cloud, executives often want to follow all the latest IT trends. Application developers are no different, except that they want to preserve all of the hard work they and their colleagues have done, while still meeting the new demands of the business. How can this be done? The answer could lie in employing open-source technologies, but in a manner that acknowledges that these technologies would never have been able to flourish without business-oriented languages such as RPG and the applications that millions of programmers have created and supported over more than four decades.

  RPG Gave Us

  …

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