• Choosing The Language To Transform Your Applications

  October 19, 2020 Michael Killian

  (Sponsored Content) Most of our customers are comfortable with RPG since it is the predominant language on the IBM i, and most are familiar with Java and .NET since those languages have been around for two to three decades. But many are not as familiar with Node.js.

  There are a lot of great resources available regarding Node.js, so I thought amalgamating that information into one concise article for ease of reference might be a better use of your time. There are so many resources out there to give context and meaning to Node.js, so I have put together a list …

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• CNX Releases Beta of Valence 6.0

  September 2, 2020 Alex Woodie

  CNX last week announced the beta release of Valence 6.0, the newest version of its Web development framework and portal for IBM i. Valence 6.0 brings a whole new look and feel to Web applications created with Valence, as well as updates to administrative functions, the data access layer, and more.

  Valence is a set of tools for creating Web and mobile applications that run under IBM i’s Apache Web server and access existing RPG business logic. The product has several components, including a JavaScript library; a set of RPG procedures for integrating various JavaScript libraries (Ext JS, React, or …

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• HCL Certifies Domino 11 on IBM i/Power

  August 5, 2020 Alex Woodie

  Domino 11 officially shipped in late 2019 by HCL Technologies, the company selected by IBM to continue development of the Domino family of products in 2017. Last month, the company announced that Domino 11 running on IBM i has been certified on select Power9 servers. Among the new capabilities that it brings is the new low-code Volt environment.

  The Domino family of products, including Notes, Sametime, Connections, and Traveler, has been through quite a bit over the past few years. After nearly a decade of neglect by IBM, HCL Tech made the development of Domino 10 a priority for the …

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• Wire IoT Up To IBM i With Node-RED

  July 6, 2020 Alex Woodie

  The Internet of Things (IoT) brings a new way to think about our digital world. From sensors on a manufacturing line to Twitter messages from the other side of the world, the IoT brings it all together. And with Node-RED, a low-code framework that is available on IBM i, wiring up these data flows into useful applications is surprisingly easy.

  Created by IBM, Node-RED is a Node.JS-based framework for developing event-driven data applications, or “flows,” that deliver a data payload in the form of the JavaScript Object Notation (JSON) data standard, from a source to a destination. Node-RED flows …

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• 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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• 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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• 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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• ARCAD Unveils GUI Modernization Tool

  September 25, 2019 Alex Woodie

  ARCAD Software is getting deeper into the application modernization business with the launch of iNow, a new tool designed to help IBM i users create compelling graphical user interfaces (GUI) that run across Windows, Web, and mobile form factors. The new offering, which is based on Microsoft .NET and utilizes Remote Desktop Protocol (RDP) technology, is being sold as part of a new suite called ARCAD for IBM i Modernization.

  IBM i shops have been adapting their applications to Windows interfaces for the better part of 30 years, to the Web for about 20 years, and to mobile interfaces for …

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• Guru: Enumerated Data Types In RPG

  September 16, 2019 Ted Holt

  IT has changed a lot since I entered the field several decades ago, but some things have not changed. I would read in those early days that COBOL was dead, and I read the same thing now. Yet COBOL is 60 years old and still going strong. Back then I heard RPG criticized as “Real Poor Garbage”. These days I hear it scorned as “legacy”, which I assume is supposed to mean the same thing. Yet today’s RPG is better than any of its predecessors for business programming.

  RPG supposedly does not have the features of modern languages. Maybe not, …

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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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