• What’s Cooking In Code For IBM i?

  July 15, 2024 Alex Woodie

  With IBM beginning to pull back on green screen development tools for IBM i, the importance of Code for IBM i to the IBM i development community has never been greater. The good news is that there’s a lot of development activity at the moment around the Visual Studio Code plug-in, with new features to replace some of the outgoing greenscreen functionality.

  IBM announced that it was killing off some of the green screen development tools in its Application Development Toolset (ADTS) as part of its Technology Refresh (TR) for IBM i 7.4 and 7.5 in early May. Among the …

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• IBM Begins the Purge of Old Greenscreen Utilities

  July 10, 2024 Alex Woodie

  IBM is prepping the IBM i community to prepare to adapt to some substantial changes that are coming with the next release of IBM i, including the end of support for a large swath of the Application Development ToolSet (ADTS) that ships with Rational Development Studio (RDS). Source Entry Utility (SEU) and Programming Development Manager (PDM) are not among the ADTS tools getting the boot, but that’s not stopping midrange professionals from speculating that their time in IBM i is limited, too.

  As part of its May 7 Technology Refresh for IBM i 7.4 and 7.5, IBM issued a “software …

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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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• MDNA Launches Unit Testing Tool for IBM i

  June 19, 2024 Alex Woodie

  Midrange Dynamics North America (MDNA) recently launched a new unit testing tool that’s designed to make it easier for IBM i developers to test their code. The software, called MDTest, is works with RDi and VS Code and integrates with MDNA’s change management software for IBM i.

  MDNA created MDTest to provide for a simple way for developers to unit test their ILE code. The software automates the process of executing test scripts, recording results, and determining whether the software can be pushed into the next stage of the DevOps processes.

  The product includes about 30 pre-built software quality tests …

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• Youthful IBM i Optimism In Fort Worth

  June 3, 2024 Alex Woodie

  The IBM i community showed up in force last month for COMMON’s annual conference. And they sure didn’t drive or fly to Fort Worth for the weather, which was hot and muggy. The POWERUp 2024 attendees – all 1,100 of them – came to the show to learn about the platform, which may be in the early stages of – dare we say it? – a youth moment.

  First things first: the attendance number. COMMON was shooting for about 1,000, which is about where its annual spring conference has been for the better part of a decade (the fall conferences …

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• ARCAD Breaks Up Monolithic Code With New Transformer Tool

  June 3, 2024 Alex Woodie

  There are many different aspects to application modernization: moving from 5250 greenscreens to Web interfaces, adopting the SQL database engine, and using DevOps techniques. Another part of modernization is breaking up monolithic codebases into smaller, more manageable chunks that can be more readily integrated using APIs and Web services, and that’s the goal of a new version of its Transformer product line launched recently by ARCAD Software.

  ARCAD Software already offers several capabilities under its Transformer brand, including Transformer RPG for converting fixed-format RPG to free-format RPG; Transformer DB for converting DDS files to modern DDL tables; Transformer Field for …

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• Rocket DevOps Gets Update for Free Format RPG, VS Code, and DORA

  April 24, 2024 Alex Woodie

  The latest release of Rocket’s change management tool for IBM i brings several new capabilities, including improved support for VS Code and Free Form RPG. Rocket DevOps version 10.3.1 also brings better code testing capabilities and will help companies comply with new regulations, such as the EU’s Digital Operations Resilience Act (DORA).

  Rocket Software added support for the browser-based development environment VS Code last fall with the launch of Rocket DevOps version 10.2.2. Customers will find the new release of Rocket DevOps improves on that initial VS Code support, says Puneet Kohli, the president of the Rocket’s Application Modernization Business …

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• What the 2024 Marketplace Report Says About IBM i App Dev, Language Use

  March 13, 2024 Alex Woodie

  What languages, development environments, and tools are IBM i developers currently using to create new applications? How many users are still on SEU? And how are VS Code and Merlin faring among Web-based development tools? Fortra sought to answer those questions with its IBM i Marketplace Survey for 2024, and the results may surprise you.

  In late 2023, Fortra surveyed 270 IBM i professionals from around the world for the 2024 IBM i Marketplace Survey, which it published in January. You can download the report here.

  For the most part, Fortra asks the same questions every year, which is …

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• IBM Patches New Security Vulns In IBM i Components, Power Firmware

  February 12, 2024 Alex Woodie

  IBM has patched a series of moderate security vulnerabilities in IBM i products and Power firmware over the past two weeks. The IBM i flaws span Rational Developer for i (RDi), Access Client Solutions (ACS), and the Java development kit and runtime, while the Power flaw involves PowerVM and its communications with the Hardware Management Console (HMC).

  Concerns over security hit an all-time high in the IBM i community according to the IBM i Marketplace 2024 study conducted by Fortra. The survey found that 79 percent of IBM i professionals considered security a top concern, a 10 percent increase …

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• IBM i PTF Guide, Volume 26, Number 6

  February 12, 2024 Doug Bidwell

  This week we have three new security vulnerabilities, but first we want to remind you that you need to prepare firewalls and proxies for the upcoming infrastructure changes for IBM Call Home, Electronic Fix Distribution. This is considered HIPER by IBM (High Impact/Pervasive), which you can read about here. Public Internet IP addresses are changing for the IBM servers that support Call Home and electronic download of fixes for customer systems’ software, hardware, and operating system. This change pertains to all operating systems and applications connecting to IBM for electronic Call Home and fix download. If you have a …

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