• Is It Time To Add The Rust Programming Language To IBM i?

  May 19, 2025 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Back in February, IBM announced that it had brought the Rust programming language to its AIX Unix operating system variant. Rust, of course, has long since been available on Red Hat Enterprise Linux. But, thus far, it has not been supported on the IBM i platform, neither in the PASE AIX runtime (which is a common way to get Unix stuff inside of IBM i) or natively recompiled inside of IBM i itself.

  The initial release of the Rust SDK for AIX was based on the stable Rust 1.84 release, and it uses the same LLVM compiler framework that …

  Read more

• Steve Will Lifts the Curtain On “Major IBM i Announcement,” But Just A Smidge

  March 3, 2025 Alex Woodie

  If you haven’t heard yet, here it is: IBM is planning to make a major IBM i announcement soon. IBM i chief architect Steve Will said as much during his recent IBM i Guided Tour. While Will shared a general outline of what IBM has in mind for the major announcement, specifics still are few and far between.

  Will, who also holds the titles of IBM i CTO and IBM distinguished engineer, teased the IBM i community with his one-hour February 12 presentation, which is titled IBM i in 2025 – A Strategic Preview. You can access a recording …

  Read more

• IBM Announcements: Service Price Hikes, HANA Iron As A Service, Rust for AIX And Maybe PASE, And More. . .

  February 17, 2025 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  When Big Blue makes big announcements, we break them down and analyze them uniquely. But there are often a lot of little things that happen over the course of a few weeks, and we like to lump these together and give you the rundown. That way you are informed, but you can skim it.

  So let’s take a look the things related to Power Systems and IBM i that have happened in the past few weeks since we last did this. Let’s start with a few price changes.

  In announcement letter AD25-0140, dated February 3 and effective on March …

  Read more

• 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 …

  Read more

• Project Aims to Port .NET Framework to Power

  March 16, 2022 Alex Woodie

  IBM and its Red Hat subsidiary are working with Microsoft to port the .NET Framework to Power, IT Jungle has learned. The project has been underway for a while, and the first bits of beta code should be available for developers to play with later this year.

  Ever since it released .NET Compiler Platform codenamed “Roslyn” at the Build conference in April 2014, which it followed up with the release of .NET Core back later that year, Microsoft has been courting the open source world with its flagship development environment. This represented a big shift in strategy for the Redmond, …

  Read more

• Feeling Insecure About The Weak Security At Most IBM i Shops

  February 8, 2021 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  It is always a wonder to us that, in this day and age, every IBM i shop, which is by definition running mission critical workloads, is not using high availability clustering of systems in their datacenter, disaster recovery and failover of some type or another to a remote site, and supplemental security to lock down those parts of the system that are not, by default within the IBM i platform, locked down.

  It’s a bit of a mystery. Of the 120,000 to 150,000 unique customers running IBM i platforms in the world, maybe 20,000 have some sort of HA/DR and …

  Read more

• Is It Time To Rename RPG?

  August 24, 2020 Alex Woodie

  Should IBM rename RPG, and if so, what should the new name be? It’s an interesting idea, and one that was recently floated by a member of the IBM i community, who submitted an official request for enhancement (RFE) on the matter. The crux of the argument is that full free-format RPG is such a dramatic departure from fixed-format RPG that it deserves a new name. But will IBM, which owns the language, go along with the change?

  Report Program Generator, or RPG, debuted way back in 1959, at the dawn of the computer age, as a way to replicate …

  Read more

• Wanted: A Real ROI Study For Midrange Platforms

  October 28, 2019 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  There is no shortage of IBM i shops that are sitting on back releases of the operating system and related systems software, or older Power Systems iron, or both. Sometimes, it takes a little convincing to get upper management to listen about how IT operations could be improved and extended if the company would only make some investments in upgrading the hardware and systems software. Sometimes it takes a lot of convincing, particularly when many small and medium businesses are run by their owners and in a certain sense any money that would be allocated for an upgrade is their …

  Read more

• IBM i 7.3 And 7.4 Get Their Autumn Tech Refreshes

  October 9, 2019 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Big Blue is hosting its IBM Systems Technical University this week, and used the occasion to quietly launch the Technology Refreshes, or TRs as they are known, for IBM i releases 7.3 and 7.4. If you were running around the Venetian Hotel, you could probably stitch together the extent of the updates to the platform, and to be honest, we are still trying to get all of the details, which were not available as we went to press.

  We will tell you what we know now, and then circle back and drill down into the details as appropriate.

  First of …

  Read more

• Eradani Bridges The Gap Between Legacy And Open Source

  July 8, 2019 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  In this publication, legacy is not a dirty word or even remotely pejorative. Rather, “legacy” is just a shorthand way of delineating between applications that encapsulate decades of the evolution of a business and the transactions it processes, and all of the other new stuff that this business is also doing and perhaps coding with newer tools and programming languages.

  A new company, called Eradani, has been founded by some experts in both the IBM i world and the open source world with the express purpose of building a technical bridge so these two different cultures can see a …

  Read more

Previous Articles