• DevOps Means Using The Tools You Already Have Better

  April 24, 2024 Jeff Tickner

  In this world, there are always more than two ways to skin a cat, but the best way to skin any cat is the way you already know how to do it.

  The same is true of application development from within a DevOps toolchain. When modernizing development processes on IBM i, the most efficient thing to do, always, is to make use of enterprise tools already in place within the organization and integrate these into a cohesive IBM i workflow that shepherds code from idea to production all along the way.

  It may seem obvious to say so, but trust …

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• What the Latest ALL400s Survey Tells Us About the IBM i Community

  October 18, 2023 Alex Woodie

  What is the most popular development tool in the IBM i community? What technology exists in nearly every shop? What BI tools are in use? And what activities are sitting in the IT backlog’s of IBM i shops? These are some of the questions that ALL400s answered with the latest edition of its IBM i community survey.

  You may have heard about ALL400s as the comprehensive list of IBM i customers around the world. John Rockwell, the Florida man behind ALL400s, does his best to keep the list as updated as possible.

  In addition to the list, Rockwell has put …

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• Take A Progressive Approach To DevOps

  October 16, 2023 Jeff Tickner

  As Gene Amdahl, the chief architect of the IBM System/360 mainframe, correctly observed and what was subsequently codified as Amdahl’s Law, any kind of system that implements any kind of process is only as fast as its slowest component. What is true of bottlenecks in human processes is equally true in systems design and also in that overlapping area known as DevOps – the confluence of application development and system operations.

  If you can only be as fast as your slowest bottleneck, the converse is also true that you can speed up overall throughput of a workflow or a …

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• Rocket Rolls Out IBM i Modernization Bundle

  March 6, 2023 Alex Woodie

  Rocket Software last week unveiled a new collection of tools designed to help IBM i shops elevate their game across multiple IT disciplines. Dubbed the Rocket Modernization Suite for IBM i, the new bundle brings together existing Rocket offerings in the DevOps, APIs, test automation, HA/DR, terminal emulation, and Web-enablement spaces. It’s all about lowering the barrier to adopting Rocket tools and improving customer productivity when they do, the company says.

  Like other software vendors in the space, Rocket Software has accumulated somewhat of a disparate collection of tools for the IBM i server. The Massachusetts vendor started its IBM …

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• Rocket Launches New DevOps Solution for IBM i

  March 23, 2022 Alex Woodie

  Rocket Software last week took the covers off a newly branded solution aimed at bringing IBM i development processes into the future. Dubbed Rocket DevOps, the offering is based on the existing Rocket Aldon offering and is designed to enable IBM i shops to adopt the latest CI/CD development and operations practices. The suite also will welcome a new testing solution next month.

  Rocket DevOps was created to be a soup-to-nuts DevOps solutions that gives development and delivery teams everything they need to develop and deploy high quality and secure IBM i code in an efficient manner. In addition to …

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• Value Stream Management: Bringing Lean Manufacturing Techniques To IBM i Development

  September 20, 2021 Andrew Ireland

  When resources are tight, it is important to optimize their usage and maximize the business value they deliver. This is the very foundation of what is called lean manufacturing or just-in-time manufacturing, which more than a few IBM i shops know a thing or two about because this platform has been used for decades by process and discrete manufacturers to automate their businesses.

  The move toward DevOps has allowed software engineers to adopt many of the best practices developed by manufacturing over the last 100 years. These include automating the flow of code, a repository of standard components and a …

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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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• Get A Move On To Learn More About Moving To Git Source Control On IBM i

  June 21, 2021 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Time is running out if you want to hear about how you can move to modern DevOps technologies and merge them with your IBM i platform, bridging the gap between new and legacy. (We don’t use the word old around these parts.)

  On June 24, ARCAD Software will be highlighting the how BWI Companies, which is based in Nash, Texas, has adopted Git source control on the IBM i platform, bridging the transaction processing systems behind its lawn, garden, animal health, agriculture, landscape, and pest management products distribution business. BWI was founded in 1958 by Bob and Betty Bunch …

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• Moving To Git Source Control On IBM i

  June 14, 2021 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  It is one thing when vendors create tools that help users do things, but quite another when users talk about how they use those tools and how well they work.

  On June 24, ARCAD Software will be highlighting how BWI Companies, which is based in Nash, Texas, has adopted Git source control on the IBM i platform, bridging the transaction processing systems behind its lawn, garden, animal health, agriculture, landscape, and pest management products distribution business. BWI was founded in 1958 by Bob and Betty Bunch as a seed retailer based in Texarkana, Texas, and in 1972 started wholesale …

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• ARCAD Plugs IBM i DevOps Suite Into Microsoft Azure

  January 18, 2021 Alex Woodie

  IBM i developers can now leverage a collection of DevOps tools on the Microsoft Azure cloud platform, courtesy of a new integration announced in December 2020 by ARCAD Software.

  Azure DevOps is an end-to-end DevOps environment that provides a range of project management services for developers who are building software to deploy on Azure or other platforms.

  Microsoft ostensibly introduced the software as a service (SaaS) offering back in October 2018. But in reality, Azure DevOps is the latest name of a product that can trace its lineage back to 2006, when Microsoft launched Visual Studio Team System.

  Through its …

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