• Guru: For IBM i Newcomers, An Access Client Solutions Primer

  March 1, 2021 Rob McNelly

  I enjoy reading about IBM i Fresh Faces. Sure, it’s refreshing to see that it’s not just graybeards like me who are working on the platform, but what really matters is that young people are learning about, getting hands-on with, and coming to love IBM i. I appreciate that many of these stories revolve around system/application modernization and open source solutions. This gives newcomers to IBM i a degree of comfort by reducing their learning curve.

  Learning any new technology is challenging. Specifically, how do you go from learning about the concepts to actually getting on a machine and …

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• Power Systems Security: More Than The Sum Of Its Parts

  February 17, 2021 Tony Perera

  (Sponsored Content) The IBM i platform is no longer an island unto itself. In many companies, there is a diversity of different systems — Unix systems, Linux servers, and Windows environments, not to mention IBM i. Each of these environments brings its own strength and weakness. The goal is to not let these differences hurt something that’s important to you: security.

  Make no mistake: It’s a good thing that Power Systems servers can run multiple operating systems. From an IBM i perspective, it ensures more R&D dollars from IBM to support the hardware. It seems doubtful IBM would spend billions …

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• SoftLanding Adds Support for Source Stream Files

  February 3, 2021 Alex Woodie

  IBM i shops developing in a mix of open source and native languages can now manage all of their development projects together in a new release of SoftLanding Systems’ TURNOVER software. The big change that enables that open source support is how SoftLanding adapted its change management software to support stream files on the IFS. The company also took the opportunity to add a new Web interface and rebrand its entire TURNOVER suite of products.

  First, let’s clear up the name changes. TURNOVER Lifecycle Manager is the new name of the change management software that used to go by TURNOVER …

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• 2021 Predictions for IBM i: Part Two

  January 20, 2021 Alex Woodie

  The response from the first batch of IBM i prediction we ran last week was superb. Here’s hoping that the community finds the second batch of predictions equally as worthwhile.

  Chris Wey, the president of the Power Business Unit at Rocket Software, wonders if crystal balls have any power left following the events of last year. “After an unpredictable 2020, the very notion of predictions is called into question,” Wey says. “Still, as an optimist, I believe we will see some incredibly positive outcomes of the past year’s turmoil in the coming year in our space.

  “First, Power systems …

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• 2021 Predictions for IBM i, Part 1

  January 13, 2021 Alex Woodie

  With an eventful 2020 thankfully in the rearview mirror, it’s time to start thinking about what 2021 might have in store for us. The IBM i community, like most of the world, could use a little bit of hope at the moment. We asked IBM i community leaders to deliver predictions, and they responded.

  Liam Allan, who is a consultant at Seiden Group and the creator of ILE Editor, has a couple of predictions for IT Jungle.

  “My focus is mainly software. I do still predict Node.js gaining traction on IBM i,” Allan writes. “The tooling is really …

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• The Prickly Pear Of Auto ID For IBM i

  December 16, 2020 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  (Sponsored Content) Good companies can batten down the hatches and pilot their enterprise through rough economic waters, but great companies identify opportunities and successfully pursue them whether or not times are good or bad. It takes a bit of pliability to be adaptable enough to not just accept change, but to embrace it, and also to be certain enough of your company and its customers to build a core user base and just serve those customers relentlessly with steady improvements. This is a tough balancing act, but if you look at the case studies, you find this balance …

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• VS Code Provides Another Coding Option for IBM i

  December 9, 2020 Alex Woodie

  IBM i shops that are looking for an alternative to IBM’s Rational Developer for IBM i (RDi) may want to check out a lightweight code editor from Microsoft called Visual Studio Code (VS Code). Thanks to extensions for IBM i languages developed by the opensource community, VS Code can support native development in RPG, CL, and SQL.

  First released by Microsoft in 2015, VS Code provides a basic environment for writing and editing code. It features debugging, syntax highlighting, intelligent code completion, snippets, and code refactoring, as well as embedded Git. It runs on Windows, Linux, and Mac, and while …

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• Grafana Provides a Visualization Option for IBM i Metrics

  November 4, 2020 Alex Woodie

  Today’s IT professional needs to stay informed on what’s happening across a slew of systems, including storage and CPU utilization. Having a platform-neutral system to visualize all these metrics is important, and one of the most widely used open source observability platforms today is a project called Grafana.

  Grafana was originally developed back in 2014 by a developer at Orbitz to be a front-end for Graphite, which another Orbitz developer created years earlier for capturing and storing time-series data generated by a wide array of servers, storage systems, applications, and other pieces of IT gear.

  Eventually, the creators decided that …

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• Profound and Connectria Hook Up in Cloud-Modernization Push

  October 21, 2020 Alex Woodie

  IBM i modernization tool provider Profound Logic and Connectria, one of the biggest private cloud providers for IBM i, announced a strategic partnership last week. The goal of the union, representatives with both companies say, is to give their respective IBM i customers a leg up as they seek to streamline their IT systems.

  Matt Biegacki, the vice president and chief marketing officer for Connectria, and Michael Killian, the vice president of strategic accounts for Profound Logic, shared their thoughts on the partnership during a call with IT Jungle this week.

  From Profound Logic’s perspective, the partnership with …

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• 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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