• VS Code Will Be The Heart Of The Modern IBM i Platform

  June 23, 2025 Sebastien Julliand

  For application programmers, the workspace is not a place to sit with a screen, a keyboard, a chair, but rather is an integrated development environment within which code can be created, shared, compiled, and managed either inside the tool itself or through plug-in extensions that link it to other tools. IDEs have been around for decades and are not anything new. What is new is how suddenly popular one particular IDE – VS Code – has become.

  For the past several years, nearly three quarters of the programmers in the world polled for the Stack Overflow Developer Survey say that …

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• What’s Cooking In Code For IBM i?

  July 15, 2024 Alex Woodie

  With IBM beginning to pull back on green screen development tools for IBM i, the importance of Code for IBM i to the IBM i development community has never been greater. The good news is that there’s a lot of development activity at the moment around the Visual Studio Code plug-in, with new features to replace some of the outgoing greenscreen functionality.

  IBM announced that it was killing off some of the green screen development tools in its Application Development Toolset (ADTS) as part of its Technology Refresh (TR) for IBM i 7.4 and 7.5 in early May. Among the …

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• IBM Begins the Purge of Old Greenscreen Utilities

  July 10, 2024 Alex Woodie

  IBM is prepping the IBM i community to prepare to adapt to some substantial changes that are coming with the next release of IBM i, including the end of support for a large swath of the Application Development ToolSet (ADTS) that ships with Rational Development Studio (RDS). Source Entry Utility (SEU) and Programming Development Manager (PDM) are not among the ADTS tools getting the boot, but that’s not stopping midrange professionals from speculating that their time in IBM i is limited, too.

  As part of its May 7 Technology Refresh for IBM i 7.4 and 7.5, IBM issued a “software …

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• IBM Banking on Merlin 2.0 to Goose Modern Development on IBM i

  June 19, 2024 Alex Woodie

  IBM last week shipped most of the new stuff unveiled in the Spring Technology Refreshes, which includes Merlin 2.0, the Web-based application development and modernization environment for IBM i. Big Blue is betting that the new and improved offering will encourage IBM i shops to (finally) begin their journey toward truly modern coding techniques.

  Friday, June 14 marked the start of general availability for the majority of the features IBM is including in IBM i 7.5 TR4 and IBM i 7.4 TR10, which it announced on May 8. The version 2.0 release of Merlin – whose official IBM name …

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• Eradani Debuts DevOps Suite for IBM i

  October 4, 2023 Alex Woodie

  It’s been five years since Dan Magid, the former CEO of Aldon and an executive with Rocket Software, has been involved in the IBM i change management and DevOps business. But with next week’s launch of Eradani DevOps at COMMON’s NAViGATE conference, the longtime change management expert is getting back into the game. This time, however, Magid is taking a decidedly different approach.

  What makes Eradani DevOps stand out from other change management tools on IBM i is its focus on open source tools. The folks at Eradani have realized that application developers in the mainstream IT world have pretty …

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• To Kill SEU Or Not Kill SEU – That Is The Question

  July 12, 2023 Alex Woodie

  It was a simple question posed by Liam Allan on Ryver: Should IBM stop shipping SEU? The dozens of answers it generated exposed a stark divide when it comes to the use of legacy technology in the IBM i ecosystem and to what extent it’s okay for IBM to force its customers to adopt new technology.

  There is no denying that IBM’s Source Entry Utility (SEU) is still in widespread use in the IBM i world. Statistics are tough to come by, but evidence suggests a majority of IBM i developers still use the greenscreen development tool for at least …

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• IBM Merlin Brings New Approach to Developing on IBM i

  May 4, 2022 Alex Woodie

  IBM is rolling out a new application development framework dubbed Merlin as part of its release of IBM i version 7.5. Designed primarily as a lightweight alternative to RDi and running in containers, Merlin could provide a guide for how IBM sources and distributes development tools going forward.

  Merlin is a new Licensed Program Product (LPP) offering from IBM designed to enable IBM i developers to create new ILE programs from scratch, or to modernize existing ones. The software, which is officially called Modernization Engine for Lifecycle Integration, is based on a mix of open source and proprietary tools from …

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• Guru: RDi 9.6, Part 12 – New Features Targeting New RDi Users

  December 6, 2021 Susan Gantner

  In my previous tip about the latest release (9.6.0.11) of RDi, I promised to cover new features targeting easing the transition from PDM/SEU for new RDi users. If you’re an experienced RDi user, don’t tune out yet — you may find something of interest, too.

  I’ll discuss most of these features in the context of the PDM perspective. This is the perspective designed specifically to ease the transition to RDi. It was introduced originally back in 9.6.0.3 and I covered a little about it in a tip back then. While it was created to target new users, it seems …

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• IBM Wheels And Deals With Solution Edition Booster Pack

  June 8, 2020 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  A few weeks ago, we told you about the double memory and double I/O request for price quote (RPQ) special deals that IBM quietly rolled out in April without putting out any announcement letters and that are still in effect until June 30. So consider this a reminder that these deals are still out there and now is a good time to invest in new Power9 iron if you want to pay less for it than you otherwise might.

  But that is not all you can get. As it turns out, Big Blue is revamping its IBM i Solution Edition …

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• Welcome To The ‘Riehl’ World: Live, Hands-On IBM i Training

  May 18, 2020 Alex Woodie

  IBM i shops don’t have a ton of options available when it comes to online IBM i education these days. If you’re in the market to improve your skills, one of the outfits that should be on your shortlist is The 400 School, which is one of the few places left that offers hands-on IBM i education, according to the company’s founder and president, Dan Riehl.

  Riehl has had the kind of IBM midrange career that younger folks arriving on the platform today can only dream of. He has founded companies, written books, worked as a security consultant and …

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