• Liam Allan Shares What’s Coming Next With Code For IBM i

  June 23, 2025 Alex Woodie

  The rise of Code for IBM i arguably is the best IBM i technology story of the past few years. The VS Code development environment came out of nowhere to challenge Rational Developer for i as the pre-eminent developer tool on the platform. And according to Liam Allan, who started this whole thing, Code for i is only going to get better in the months and years to come.

  There is clear and unmistakable momentum behind VS Code and Code for IBM i, the VS Code plug-in that Liam Allan created back in 2021 while working at Seiden Group …

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• VS Code Will Be The Heart Of The Modern IBM i Platform

  June 23, 2025 Sebastien Julliand

  For application programmers, the workspace is not a place to sit with a screen, a keyboard, a chair, but rather is an integrated development environment within which code can be created, shared, compiled, and managed either inside the tool itself or through plug-in extensions that link it to other tools. IDEs have been around for decades and are not anything new. What is new is how suddenly popular one particular IDE – VS Code – has become.

  For the past several years, nearly three quarters of the programmers in the world polled for the Stack Overflow Developer Survey say that …

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• Remain Begins Migrating DevOps Tools To VS Code

  June 9, 2025 Alex Woodie

  For years, Remain Software was 100 percent devoted to Rational Developer for i (RDi) IBM’s flagship development tool for IBM i. It was a good bet, as the bulk of the market used RDi. However, in recent years, popularity of VS Code has soared, and now Remain is embarking upon a major project to redevelop all of its DevOps functionality to work with the browser-based IDE.

  Wim Jongman, the managing editor of Remain Software, started working on the company’s flagship change management product for AS/400, TD/OMS back in 1992. During its iSeries years in the early 2000s, Remain pivoted …

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• IBM i PTF Guide, Volume 27, Number 23

  June 9, 2025 Doug Bidwell

  It’s pretty quiet this week, which is good. We gave you a lot of stuff to do last week anyway, so now you can really get caught up.

  The important thing is a new security vulnerability, which is in Security Bulletin: IBM Rational Developer for i is affected by an unspecified Java runtime encryption vulnerability (CVE-2025-21587). You can find out more about this issue with RDi at this link. The affected releases include Rational Developer for i 9.8.0.0 through 9.8.0.4, and the recommended fix is to install the RDi 9.8.0.5 update.

  Here is the rundown of PTF Groups by …

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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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• Public Preview For Watson Code Assistant for i Available Soon

  May 21, 2025 Alex Woodie

  At the COMMON POWERUp 2025 conference this week, IBM pulled the covers back a bit on Watson Code Assistant for IBM i, the new name for the AI-powered coding assistant that IBM first started talking about one year ago. A public preview of WCA for i is becoming available to a limited number of testers, with general availability expected in the second half of the year.

  There has been quite a bit of development in the IBM i coding co-pilot this month. On May 7, during the IBM Think conference, two IBM executives wrote a blog post announcing WCA for …

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• FAX/400 And CICS For i Are Dead. What Will IBM Kill Next?

  May 19, 2025 Alex Woodie

  A number of IBM i products and functions were sunsetted and are no longer supported with IBM i 7.6, including some of the greenscreen Application Development ToolSet (ADTS) tools like Screen Design Aid (SDA) and Report Layout Utility (RLU), and more than two dozen others. This shouldn’t come as news, as IBM previously announced its intent. But what products and functions will IBM kill with the next release of IBM i? A cryptic post by IBM on its website has the community talking.

  As part of the May 2024 Technology Refresh (TR) cycle for IBM i 7.4 and 7.5, Big …

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• Say Goodbye To Downtime: Update Your Database Without Taking Your Business Offline

  May 5, 2025 Donna Westmoreland

  Downtime is costly, impacting productivity, revenue, and customer trust. For retailers and financial institutions, even a few minutes can mean significant losses. This is why enterprises rely on IBM i Db2 for mission-critical systems. IBM i offers 99.999 percent availability, high stability, robust failover strategies, and real-time monitoring to reduce unplanned downtime.

  However, planned downtime for critical updates and projects is also necessary. The challenge lies in scheduling this maintenance and upgrades without disrupting business applications. So, how can we utilize new functionality and optimize systems with minimal disruption?

  Database File Updates

  It is not surprising that businesses tend to …

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• The Top Ten IBM i Requests From The IBM Ideas Portal

  April 2, 2025 Alex Woodie

  Big Blue is gearing up for a major new release of the IBM i operating system. We don’t know yet what will be in the release, but we can forge some guesses by checking out what new features the IBM i community is requesting through the IBM Ideas portal, and how IBM reacts to them.

  IBM prides itself on being a customer-focused organization, and so it looks to the IBM i community for direction on what sort of features, capabilities, and fixes the IBM i community currently is looking for. That community outreach takes various forms, including the COMMON Americas …

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• Guru: AI Pair Programming In RPG With GitHub Copilot

  February 17, 2025 Gregory Simmons

  If you have been meaning to give VS Code a try, but just haven’t had a chance, I encourage you to avail yourself today. Yes, for you RDi users, it will take a little bit to migrate your favorite settings, code snippets, and compile commands – but I promise, you won’t regret the move.

  In my article, Getting Started With The Code 4 i Extension Within VS Code, I offer a few more insights to help get you started. And if you are an SEU user, yes, the switch may seem daunting, but one of the great things about …

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