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What Do IBM i Shops Use To Write Applications These Days?

February 3, 2025 Alex Woodie

When it comes to languages and tools for developing applications on IBM i, there are a ton of options available for customers. Thanks to the PASE runtime, a variety of open source languages and runtimes have been brought to the platform, not to mention the time-tested ILE technologies from IBM. But what do IBM i shops actually use to write new apps? For answers, we look to Fortra’s 2025 IBM i Marketplace Survey results.

Fortra recently released the results for the 11th installment of its IBM i Marketplace Survey, which is based on surveys it conducted in late 2025 …
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What’s Up with Open Source on IBM i?

March 27, 2024 Alex Woodie

Open source software has become a steadfast component of the IBM i stack. But what open source software are IBM i shops using today? Results from Fortra’s recent IBM i Marketplace Survey provide answers.

It may seem odd now, but open source hasn’t always been a staple of the IBM i server’s software diet. Until PHP arrived on the platform two decades ago, proprietary software was the only option for IBM i shops.

But today, IBM i shops have hundreds of open source products to choose from. Thanks to the IBM i server’s openness, just about any product that can …
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What the 2024 Marketplace Report Says About IBM i App Dev, Language Use

March 13, 2024 Alex Woodie

What languages, development environments, and tools are IBM i developers currently using to create new applications? How many users are still on SEU? And how are VS Code and Merlin faring among Web-based development tools? Fortra sought to answer those questions with its IBM i Marketplace Survey for 2024, and the results may surprise you.

In late 2023, Fortra surveyed 270 IBM i professionals from around the world for the 2024 IBM i Marketplace Survey, which it published in January. You can download the report here.

For the most part, Fortra asks the same questions every year, which is …
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Marketplace Study Shows How IBM i Language Use Evolves

February 9, 2022 Alex Woodie

It’s no secret that RPG dominates development on the IBM i platform. SQL and Control Language (CL) are also heavily used in the day-to-day operations of tens of thousands of IBM i shops. But what about other established languages, like Java and C++? What about newer open source languages, like PHP and Node.js? The recent HelpSystems Marketplace Study provides us a clue into language use.

HelpSystems published its first IBM i Marketplace Study back in January 2016, reflecting data collected in late 2015 from 834 IBM i professionals around the world. One of the questions it has consistently asked is …
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Red Hat’s Ansible Automation Comes To IBM i

August 3, 2020 Alex Woodie

Big Blue is now supporting IBM i with Ansible, the open source configuration management software developed by Red Hat. By including IBM i and AIX as a supported target in Ansible, companies that run IBM i will be able to remotely configure and manage IBM i and AIX servers using the same Ansible tools and techniques that they use to manage mainstream X86 and cloud server environments.

Ansible was created back in 2012 by Michael DeHaan, the author of the Cobbler provisioning server and co-author of the Fedora Unified Network Controller (Func) framework for remote administration. It’s been widely adopted …
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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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Kubernetes Container Control Comes To Power Systems

October 29, 2018 Timothy Prickett Morgan

The moment that Google created a clone of parts of its internal Borg cluster and container management system and open sourced it as the Kubernetes project, the jig was pretty much up.

Google had done a lot of the fundamental work to bring containers to the Linux platform starting way back in 2005, and had shared its techniques with the open source community, leading directly to the Docker container format and the engine that runs it atop the Linux kernel. While Docker, the company, got a jump start with its Docker Swarm container orchestrator and then its fuller Docker Enterprise …
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PASE Versus ILE: Which Is Best For Open Source?

October 22, 2018 Alex Woodie

Open source has emerged as a driver of innovation in the past 20 years, and has greatly accelerated technological innovation. The proprietary IBM i platform has also benefited from this trend, thanks in large part to the capability to run Linux applications in the PASE runtime. But some members of the IBM i community are concerned that the fruits of the open source innovation have not tasted quite as sweet as they do on other platforms.

Linux was the original breakout star in open source software, and so it should be no surprise that the vast majority of software developed …
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TRs for IBM i 7.3 and 7.2: Enhancements, No Big Surprises

October 4, 2017 Dan Burger

With each Technology Refresh, we are reminded that the pace of enhancements IBM brings to its IBM i operating system and related software products is significant and that certain areas are more significant than others. So, the IBM i community is either aligned with these upgrades and eager to put them to use or it’s not yet ready, willing or able to be technologically current. As usual, there are IBM i shops watching as the enhancements unfold and making decisions on whether the enhancements can deliver benefits to their business in terms of productivity and solving business challenges.

Steve Will, …
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Open Source On IBM i: Let It Grow

May 15, 2017 Dan Burger

The evaluation of open source software is nowhere near conclusive when it comes to enterprise grade application development. Decisions remain in the exploratory phases. Roadmaps are incomplete. Most are without clear routes to a destination. Some are without destinations. However, it would be wrong to assume roads are not being built.

There is no way that the future of application development – on IBM i or anywhere else – can handle everything that is coming down the pike without open source. That’s not a mandate to jump on a band wagon. It’s an awareness wake-up call. The IBM i community …
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