• The Search For Intelligent Life Apparently Is Over

  April 1, 2019 Orwell

  Extraterrestrials from the planet Voltak in the constellation Dithmaar today shared conclusions about their recently completed mission to IS Manager Gerald Hugh’s well-run computer department located on the second floor of Statewide Tire & Rim in beautiful East Plymouth, South Dakota.

  “Thank you, Earthlings, for allowing us to examine your planet for the past two years, and in particular, we’d like to give a big shout out to Gerald Hugh’s for letting us monitor his extremely well-run information services department,” tweeted Commander Rahnzo Maxdruv of the 17th Expeditionary Fleet of Voltak Imperial Starship Command from his work account, @alienzforlife.

  “When …

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• What New Language Will IBM i Support Next?

  March 27, 2019 Alex Woodie

  The prospect of a new language coming to a platform is always reason for excitement. New languages bring new capabilities, or at least faster ways to tap into existing capabilities. The question for those living and working on the IBM i platform is what language will come next?

  RPG remains the go-to language used by the vast majority developers on the IBM i platforms. According to the 2019 survey by HelpSystems, 84 percent of coders on the box use RPG. COBOL, RPG’s partner in legacy crime, is also supported in the Rational Development for IBM i RDi, along with …

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• Building Out The .NET Stack Around Mono for IBM i

  March 13, 2019 Alex Woodie

  The first release of a Mono .NET port to IBM i was issued last year. Since then, the IBM i open source community has been busy building many of the other middleware components that will make it easier for developers to build IBM i applications using Microsoft tooling.

  Mono was ported to AIX and IBM i (via the PASE AIX runtime) last year, which gave IBM i and AIX shops the capability to run the open source .NET runtime on Power Systems servers, thus opening the door to allowing Microsoft‘s highly regarded suite of development tools to be …

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• Domino And Notes 10 Finally Come To IBM i

  February 11, 2019 Alex Woodie

  They say good things come to those who wait. The IBM i community has waited over 10 years for a new release of Domino and Notes, and they were rewarded last week when IBM announced version 10 is now available on IBM i.

  Domino and Notes 10 is the first major release of the server component of the business collaboration platform since Domino 8.5 was released way back in 2008 (version 9 was a minor release). The future of the platform was up in the air for a while, and many people who have dedicated a chunk of their careers …

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• 2019 Predictions: IBM i Trend Spotting

  January 23, 2019 Alex Woodie

  What will happen in the IBM i community this year? Maybe IBM will launch a public cloud service? Or IBM i shops will find the budget to get busy with application modernization? It’s really anybody’s guess, which is why IT Jungle solicited predictions from prominent names in the community to get their take on what will happen this year.

  The wider IT community is moving quickly to adopt next-gen development methodologies, and those will increasingly find their way into the IBM i community in 2019, predicts Dan Magid, vice president of solution sales with Rocket Software.

  “2019 will bring …

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• Open Source Is the Future, So Where Does IBM i Fit In?

  December 12, 2018 Alex Woodie

  The IBM i server reached a milestone this year when it turned 30 years old, an amazing feat for a remarkable system that continues to provide computational value to tens of thousands of organizations around the world. But another birthday was celebrated this year that the IBM i community should take note of: The 20th anniversary of the beginning of the open source movement.

  Now, this birthday is a little bit questionable because open source software existed before 1998, of course. But the time is worth marking because an important meeting took place in Palo Alto, California, where the phrase …

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• Guru: Addressing A Legitimate Question

  December 10, 2018 Ted Holt

  This is the last Monday issue of The Four Hundred for 2018. My, how time flies! I like to do something different at year end. In previous years I have solved Sudoku puzzles, found my way through mazes, solved the peg game, and more. This year I wish to honor a request that has come from various people and to address what they consider to be a legitimate question.

  As I wrote recently, the question I hear occasionally goes something like this: “Why bother with service programs? Why not use dynamic calls?” Rather than insult the …

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• Mono Comes to RPM, Making .NET on IBM i Even Easier

  December 5, 2018 Alex Woodie

  Here’s some good news for IBM i developers who want to develop using Microsoft’s .NET framework and tools: the Mono runtime for IBM i is now available via the RPM and Yum open source delivery method. Delivering Mono this way should make it even easier for IBM i developers to take advantage of the popular .NET tooling and runtime.

  Jesse Gorzinski, IBM‘s business architect of open source technologies, broke the news on Thanksgiving Day. “#IBMi users have something to be thankful for today: .NET in RPM form! Yes, you can ‘yum install’ mono now, from @friedkiwi’s repo!!” Gorzinski wrote …

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• What Is The State Of Your IBM i Modernization?

  December 3, 2018 Amanda Blackburn

  (Sponsored Content) Each IBM i shop has its own history with the platform, and its own approach to dealing with change. Some run the server like it’s still 1988, while others have invested time and money to modernize their systems and applications. Understanding the state of modernization across the IBM i community as a whole can help us discover where each of us sits on this IBM i journey and help us prepare our organizations for new challenges and opportunities.

  The IBM i server turned 30 this year, which was the cause of much celebration at industry events around the …

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• What Is Happening With RFEs For IBM i?

  October 29, 2018 Alex Woodie

  IBM customers have been encouraged to vote on product enhancements for over a year as part of the Request for Enhancement (RFE) process, and a number of new features have actually made it into IBM i technology refreshes (TRs). What new or improved IBM i functionality will Big Blue work on next?

  It’s hard to say exactly which RFE items will strike a chord with IBM product managers, since the requests can be all over the board and impact a range of components, from the IBM i OS itself and the Db2 for i database to Access Client Solutions (ACS) …

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