• Keep The IBM i Youth Movement Going With More Training, Better Tools

  June 9, 2025 Alex Woodie

  Nobody is going to mistake an IBM i conference for a college campus anytime soon. But if the recent POWERUp 2025 conference at Disneyland was any indication, there is a definite trend toward younger professionals working on the platform. While the IBM i youth movement is real, companies will benefit from some simple ways to attract and retain these new IBM i professionals.

  IBM is still working to get IBM i content back into four-year universities through the Power Skills Academy, which has been a struggle. Colleges are reluctant to invest in building a curriculum based on technologies that they …

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• SEU’s Fate, An IBM i V8, And The Odds Of A Power13

  June 2, 2025 Alex Woodie

  At COMMON’s recent POWERUp conference, IT Jungle got a chance to sit down with IBM executives to talk about the IBM i business, upcoming Power announcements, and sundry other topics, like is IBM preparing to finally kill SEU, when will we see IBM i 8.0, and does IBM feel lucky enough to launch Power13? Here’s a brief accounting of what was said.

  IBM Rochester has been in a housecleaning mode for a while now, clearing out the dead wood and rejiggering the product library for the 21st century. As part of this work, it’s moved to a subscription model and …

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• 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 …

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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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• 2025 IBM i Predictions, Part Two

  January 20, 2025 Alex Woodie

  With new wall calendars and a new (old) guy in the White House, change is in the air as we start off 2025. That much was obvious from the first installment of IBM i predictions, which ran last week. This second batch of predictions may be even bolder than the first.

  We’re in the midst of a shakeup in the tech job market, thanks to several years of elevated inflation, emergence of cloud computing, and new technologies like AI. How does that impact the IBM i job market? For insight, we turn to Bob Langieri, the owner of Excel Technical …

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• What’s New on PHP? Seiden Delivers the Goods

  October 23, 2024 Alex Woodie

  PHP has been around so long on the IBM i server that it’s practically a legacy technology at this point (not that that’s a bad thing). But if you haven’t looked at PHP lately, you might be surprised at what’s going on with the newer releases. PHP guru Alan Seiden recently brought us up to speed with the Web development language with a webinar sponsored by TUG.

  Seiden has been involved with PHP on IBM i for about 20 years. He was playing around with the open source language even before IBM and Zend worked together to bring the first …

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• Thoroughly Modern: Why Now Is The Time To Transform Your RPG/COBOL To Modern Languages

  October 7, 2024 Chris Koppe

  RPG and COBOL run some of the most important systems in business. But while your competitors release new products and features in weeks, you wait for months. That lag time is a silent threat – one that slowly erodes your competitive edge.

  Every hour spent waiting for an update, every feature delayed, is a lost opportunity. Your systems – once considered state-of-the-art – are now rigid, slow to evolve, and difficult to integrate with new technologies. While RPG/COBOL still power critical operations, they no longer support the speed and flexibility required for today’s business. The world moves faster now, and …

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• IBM Introduces Mapepire, The New Db2 For i Client

  September 9, 2024 Alex Woodie

  IBM has released a new client for connecting applications to the Db2 for i database. Dubbed Mapepire, the open source client is designed to be faster, lighter weight, and easier for developers to work with compared to existing ODBC and JDBC database clients, especially in cloud environments.

  Building an application-side database client using existing Db2 for i’s database drivers, such as ODBC and JDBC (included in the JTOpen Java toolbox for IBM i) typically entails cramming a lot of overhead into the client component, says Liam Allan, who helps develop new open source development tooling at IBM.

  “For example, jtopen …

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• How To Contribute To IBM’s GenAI Code Assistant For RPG

  July 15, 2024 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Back in October 2023, IBM launched its “Project Hopper” Watsonx Code Assistant for Z, which as the name suggests is a programming assistant that will eventually be built into the open source VS Code integrated development environment that was created by Microsoft and that is being explicitly trained to help programmers take applications coded in COBOL and convert them to Java. We speculated back then about how LLMs and GenAI might be used to do similar – and different – things for the IBM i platform, and back in May at the POWERUp 2024 conference Steve Will, the chief …

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• Where Do RPG Programmers Come From? And Other IBM i Questions

  July 10, 2024 Alex Woodie

  The IBM i community has faced a skills crunch off and on for the past decade or longer, as Baby Boomers retire and IBM i shops struggle to find replacements. One big reason for the hiring gap is that the old ways of finding new RPG programmers and other IBM i professionals no longer work like they used to, according to IBM i educator Jim Buck.

  “What they did for years was they just stole from the guys down the road,” said Buck, who is the president and CEO of IBM i training company imPower Technologies. ‘“I’ll go to …

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