• 2021: An IBM i Year in Review, Part Two

  December 15, 2021 Alex Woodie

  We’re at the tail end of another busy year of tracking the goings-on in the IBM i community, which means it is time to sit back and ponder where we’ve been. Part one of this series covered the first six months of the year, and now it’s time for the second half, which started in…

  July

  Ransomware is often thought of as an X86 problem, that the IBM i is immune. Turns out, that’s not quite accurate. In July, we shared news of a close call that one IBM i shop had with ransomware.

  As IBM got ready to ship …

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• RDi On Mac Users Are In For A Big Sur-prise

  August 2, 2021 Alex Woodie

  IBM i developers who run Rational Developer for IBM i (RDi) on macOS are running into trouble getting the IDE to run on the latest release of macOS Big Sur, version 11.5. However, with patience and perseverance, IBM i developers are finding ways to get it to run. An official fix from IBM has yet to be made.

  Reports of problems getting RDi 9.6 to run on Big Sur emerged in June, when users began to post reports on IBM i chat boards, including the new IBM Community site. Users reported problems installing RDi on Big Sur, as well as …

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• ILEditor2: Satisfying The Need For Development Speed

  April 28, 2021 Alex Woodie

  Liam Allan doesn’t like anything to slow him down. “I’m impatient,” says the young IBM i phenom. So when he’s writing RPG or COBOL, the code editor had best keep up with him. That’s a problem using something like Rational Developer for IBM i (RDi), which Allan doesn’t particularly care for. And that is one of the primary reasons why Allan developed ILEditor, which is now in its second incarnation as ILEditor 2.

  Just over a year ago, Allan and his business partner, Connor Holyday, shipped the first release of ILEditor 2. The pair had just completed an extensive …

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• New Release Of ACS Now Available

  December 9, 2020 Alex Woodie

  IBM delivered a new release of Access Client Solutions (ACS) last week, right on schedule. With ACS version 1.1.8.6, users will find a host of new features designed to accelerate their productivity across a range of uses.

  ACS is the Java-based utility that has become one of the most used (and useful) ways that administrators, programmers, and engineers can interact with the IBM i server. The software, which is free to IBM i customers on maintenance, features a 5250 emulator, 5250 printer emulation, data transfer capabilities, IFS file viewing, spool file management, and a virtual console for LAN and HMC …

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• COMMON Launches Focus, A Live Educational Series

  December 9, 2020 Alex Woodie

  COMMON yesterday kicked off the latest virtual event during this social distanced year of COVID-19. Focus is a series of half-day workshops on IBM i topics that is taking place through December 17. It’s a live event, which is good, but best of all, it’s free — as long as you are a current COMMON member.

  Focus consists of 18 half-day sessions across eight topic areas that are taking place this week (Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday) and the same days next week. The sessions, which kick off each day at 1 p.m. CT, are presented live by real live IBM …

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• IBM i Announcements Loom, and So Does POWERUp 2019

  April 15, 2019 Alex Woodie

  By now you probably know that IBM is making its next round of IBM i announcements next Tuesday, April 23, via a COMMON webcast. But what you might not know is that COMMON has more than a dozen sessions about the yet-to-be-disclosed announcements planned for the upcoming POWERUp 2019 conference taking place next month at Disneyland.

  “Right now we’re looking at about 15 or 16 sessions about the announcement itself,” COMMON Executive Director Manzoor Siddiqui tells IT Jungle. “We’re going to be the first conference where people will have access to the knowledge and the content around that.”

  On …

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• A HATS For Many Occasions

  March 25, 2019 Alex Woodie

  IBM gives customers plenty of options when it comes to its Rational Host Access Transformation software, including several modes of operation, different runtime options, and support for different operating systems in screen modernization engagements. With last week’s launch of HATS version 9.7, the development and deployment options got even wider.

  Regardless of which downstream options a HATS customer ultimately chooses, it all starts out basically the same on the front side of the sausage machine: Customers come to HATS because they have a 5250 (or 3270 or VT100) application that they want to transform, but they don’t want to go …

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• 2019 Predictions: IBM i Trend Spotting

  January 23, 2019 Alex Woodie

  What will happen in the IBM i community this year? Maybe IBM will launch a public cloud service? Or IBM i shops will find the budget to get busy with application modernization? It’s really anybody’s guess, which is why IT Jungle solicited predictions from prominent names in the community to get their take on what will happen this year.

  The wider IT community is moving quickly to adopt next-gen development methodologies, and those will increasingly find their way into the IBM i community in 2019, predicts Dan Magid, vice president of solution sales with Rocket Software.

  “2019 will bring …

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• Modern Lessons From A Fresh IBM i Developer

  October 8, 2018 Alex Woodie

  Application modernization is a big nut to crack on IBM i. That is to say, there are many ways to tackle the problem, from the code and business logic to the databases and user interfaces. But when it comes to the type of developers you should look for and how they should spend their time, Kody Robinson has a few pointers that may be worth keeping in mind.

  Robinson was a member of the first batch of “Fresh Faces” that IBM put forward in 2017 to showcase the fact that young people are building careers on the platform, and that …

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• ARCAD Debuts RPG Code Checker

  October 3, 2018 Alex Woodie

  If you write RPG, or know somebody who does, then you realize that mistakes can and will happen. However, beyond the obvious syntax errors, which should be detected immediately by the code editor, are instances where the code is sloppy or just poorly written. Those are the instances where ARCAD Software hopes to help with its new CodeChecker offering.

  ARCAD-CodeChecker, as the product is officially called, does just that: Detect poor quality RPG code before it makes it into production. If you’ve coded a bug into the program, made a design error, or taken 1,000 lines to write something that …

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