• Altair Delivers More Options for Running SAS Code

  August 1, 2022 Alex Woodie

  Companies that have legacy SAS code for analytic applications running on IBM i servers and other platforms but don’t want to pay the SAS Institute for the runtime have another option from Altair, which recently acquired World Programming.

  SAS was the dominant language for analytics for decades, starting in the 1970s, when Jim Goodnight and his colleagues developed the language at North Carolina State University. Goodnight went on to found the SAS Institute, which provided runtime and support for the open SAS code and, in the process, became the dominant provider of SAS solutions.

  The SAS hegemony has only …

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• Guru: Regular Expressions, Part 1

  July 25, 2022 Mike Larsen

  In the first part of this series, I will show how to replace characters in a string using SQL and regular expressions. I know I can replace characters using RPG or SQL, and they work great, but there are some cases where I find using regular expressions is a bit easier.

  For the examples I’ll show, I’m using the REGEXP_REPLACE function. REGEXP_REPLACE allows me to search for a particular value within a string and replace it with another value.

  In the first example (Figure 1), I want to search a string that has both letters and digits and I want …

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• In The IBM i Trenches With: Chilli IT

  May 9, 2022 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  There are many strengths in the IBM i platform besides its hardware and software architecture or the sophistication and ease of programming embodied in its development tools. The diversity of its partner ecosystem is another strength.

  As we pointed out last March with the launch of our ongoing In The IBM i Trenches series, globally there are thousands of resellers, each serving tens to hundreds to sometimes thousands of customers, as well as thousands of suppliers of third party maintenance, of technical support, of programming and system management services, and now of hosting and cloud computing. We want to get …

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• Thoroughly Modern: Improving The Digital Experience With APIs

  April 11, 2022 Marcel Sarrasin

  The world is an ever-changing place, and that means there is always something new that needs to be done to either improve applications running on the IBM i platform or to integrate them with other applications or interfaces on new kinds of devices. This is an important aspect of modernization, and one that often bridges the back-end databases and applications and the front-end interfaces through which end users access those applications – both of which need to be modernized, and often independently.

  This is made possible by having application programming interfaces, or APIs, and if IBM i customers have tens …

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• IBM Brings OpenShift Cluster Management Native On Power Iron

  March 14, 2022 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  If you went out to GitHub and grabbed the source code for the Kubernetes cloud controller, you could compile it in C/C++ or set up the runtimes for the Python chunks of it, and you would probably find some Go buried in there and you could the toolchain and get the raw Kubernetes to work on Linux partitions; you might even be able to get it to run natively on AIX, and if you were really clever, you might even be able to get it to run on IBM i.

  But you wouldn’t have very much that was useful given …

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• IBM i Salaries: Underpaid, Yet Highly Valued And Hard To Replace

  March 7, 2022 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  It is a funny old world. In many cases, the applications that are running on the IBM i platforms of the world are trapped in a kind of time warp and so are the people who created and who maintain them. This is the only plausible explanation for the fact that salaries in the IBM i real world also seem to be in a time warp. And here we are riding up a huge wave of inflation, in something of a war footing thanks to COVID and the war in Ukraine, and it is not yet clear to any of …

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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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• SrinSoft CEO Ram Hari’s Long Road on IBM i

  February 9, 2022 Alex Woodie

  Ram Hari has had the sort of IT career that many dream of. Hired in the late 1990s as a Y2K programmer, the India native climbed the corporate IT ranks, and today runs his own 500-person consulting company called SrinSoft. The New York City-based company offers a range of IT services, but with interest in IBM i modernization and migrations spiking during COVID, Hari is finding it hard to satisfy demand.

  Hari’s career started in 1995, soon after earning an undergraduate degree in computer science and electric engineering from a university in India. After getting his RPG certification, he was …

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• Yes, AI Is Happening on IBM i, and It’s Happening Now

  October 20, 2021 Alex Woodie

  Artificial intelligence is often thought of as a futuristic technology that may have repercussions for IBM i, but only in the future. Maybe AI will be important to IBM i about the same time when we have flying cars and moving sidewalks. But as a recent POWERUp presentation by an IBM cloud and AI architect shows, AI is already happening on the IBM i server, and it’s happening today.

  Benoit Marolleau, who is the cloud and AI architect for the IBM Client Center Montpellier (France), made a compelling case for IBM i shops to start exploring how they can potentially …

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• Fresche Takes On New RPG Development And Modernization With X-Elevate

  September 27, 2021 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Over the years, Fresche Solutions, the IBM i conglomerate that is focused on development of new applications as well as modernization of existing applications, their interfaces, and their databases, has acquired and built tools that help programmers create Java and PHP programs, or convert RPG applications to Java and PHP. But by its own admission, Fresche did not focus on new RPG application development or the kind of incremental programming that a lot of IBM i shops are doing to gradually modernize their applications, usually through the shift from fixed format RPG to the free form RPG that is similar …

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