• Bucking the System: Higher Ed, Hold the College

  June 12, 2019 Alex Woodie

  Jim Buck spent 15 years teaching IBM i and RPG at Gateway Technical College in Kenosha, Wisconsin. Buck achieved great things there, finding hundreds of students good jobs around the country. But ultimately the college experience grew old for Buck, so he ventured out on his own. That’s when he founded his own online IBM i educational company, imPower Technologies.

  That was two years ago, in the spring of 2017. After spending almost a year getting imPower Technologies up and running, Buck is teaching students IBM i and RPG once again. Currently he offers two courses: an introduction to IBM …

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• Does Db2 Mirror Kill The Market for Third Party HA?

  May 6, 2019 Alex Woodie

  IBM launched Db2 Mirror for i two weeks ago to great acclaim, as the clustering technology puts IBM i on par with how most other major systems provide continuous availability. But will Db2 Mirror destroy the platform’s heritage of high availability solutions? IT Jungle asked IBM and the biggest providers of logical replication solutions, and the answer is no. Here’s why.

  The first thing to understand about Db2 Mirror is that, at heart, it’s a database clustering technology. IBM figured out a way to make a single instance of Db2 for i run on two separate systems, in an active-active …

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• Original Refocuses on IBM i Test Automation

  May 1, 2019 Alex Woodie

  Original Software never left the IBM i software market, though it might have seemed that way to some people. But thanks to a new website devoted to exploring issues, challenges, and solutions on the topic of IBM i test automation, the British software company is redoubling its efforts around the midrange platform.

  “We really never un-engaged with it, to be fair,” says Original Software COO George Wilson says of IBM i. “We’ve kind of widened the radar a bit. That was probably 15 years ago. We didn’t want to limit ourselves to the IBM midrange marketplace. What we’ve just done …

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• Club Alan: Seiden Signs Liam, Corners Youth Market

  April 29, 2019 Alex Woodie

  The Seiden Group solidified its position in the futures market this month by signing the young British-born IBM i phenom Liam Allan to a long-term employment contact that will see him involved in training and open source development work, among other activities.

  Allan’s signing with Seiden Group is a reunion of sorts for Allan and Alan Seiden, the company’s founder and CEO. Allan credits Seiden with roping him into the IBM i gig via Club Seiden, an intersectionalist group devoted to exploring emerging digital and social connections involving the IBM i operating system and the open source ecosystem.

  “The …

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• Guru: Creating Excel Spreadsheets With Python

  April 29, 2019 Mike Larsen

  Over the past several years, I’ve seen a growing demand to provide business data in Excel. Some shops are content to receive their data in .csv format and then manually apply formatting to make it presentable. Wouldn’t it be better if we could provide a spreadsheet that is already formatted?

  In my opinion, the answer is yes. Most recently, I’ve been using PHP to accomplish this task. PHP works great for me, but I always like to have different options from which to choose. This is important to me because some shops may not have PHP installed. Based on that …

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• Guru: Preamble Comments

  April 15, 2019 Chris Ringer

  Do you remember what you ate for lunch two days ago? If you’re like me, you had to think about it for a minute before answering. Now imagine trying to recall the detailed requirements of a few programs you wrote a year ago so you can modify them for a new project. Or better yet, what if someone else like a retired employee or a traveling contractor coded these programs? At this point you may become very dependent on any comments they left in the code.

  It’s been said that any time spent commenting on your code now might save …

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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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• Building A Positive Culture of Learning On IBM i

  February 18, 2019 Alex Woodie

  How do you motivate IBM i programmers to keep learning new technologies, long after they have mastered the RPG skills they use the most? There’s no simple answer to that question, which was the topic of a recent conversation IT Jungle had with PHP on IBM i guru Alan Seiden and Heidi Schmidt, the head of PKS Software.

  IBM i shops face several interrelated problems when it comes to their personnel, which traditionally is one of the biggest line items in the IT budget. These challenges include: the aging of IBM i professionals; the retirements of baby boomer-aged personnel; the …

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• Settling In With IBM i For The Long Haul

  February 11, 2019 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  If nothing else, the IBM i platform has exhibited extraordinary longevity. One might even say legendary longevity, if you want to take its history all the way back to the System/3 minicomputer from 1969. This is the real starting point in the AS/400 family tree and this is when Big Blue, for very sound legal and technical and marketing reasons, decided to fork its products to address the unique needs of large enterprises (with the System/360 mainframe and its follow-ons) and small and medium businesses (starting with the System/3 and moving on through the System/34, System/32, System/38, and System/36 in …

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• More IBM i Predictions For 2019

  February 6, 2019 Alex Woodie

  We kicked off our 2019 soothsaying last week with predictions from IBM i leaders on what the New Year will bring. We keep the ball rolling this week with another batch of predictions from our friends around the IBM i community.

  According to Alison Butterill, IBM‘s the program director for offering management for IBM i, the platform will build off the momentum generated with last year’s 30th anniversary celebrant.

  “The excitement begun in 2018 as we highlighted client innovation around the world will continue into 2019,” Butterill says. “The momentum continues to grow as clients are looking at ways …

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