• Is It Time To Rename RPG?

  August 24, 2020 Alex Woodie

  Should IBM rename RPG, and if so, what should the new name be? It’s an interesting idea, and one that was recently floated by a member of the IBM i community, who submitted an official request for enhancement (RFE) on the matter. The crux of the argument is that full free-format RPG is such a dramatic departure from fixed-format RPG that it deserves a new name. But will IBM, which owns the language, go along with the change?

  Report Program Generator, or RPG, debuted way back in 1959, at the dawn of the computer age, as a way to replicate …

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• Sharing Tape Libraries Across Partitions Without VIOS

  May 4, 2020 Alex Woodie

  IBM i shops have a love-hate relationship when it comes to the Virtual I/O Server, or VIOS. With the latest IBM i Technology Refresh, IBM is giving the anti-VIOS group a feature they have been requesting: the capability to easily share a tape library among multiple logical partitions, or LPARs without involving VIOS, SANs, or multiple adapters.

  IBM is calling the new feature “IBM i Virtualization for Tape Libraries,” and it’s based on RFE (request for enhancement) number 127631. While the words “tape libraries” and “virtualization” are in there, this is not a virtual tape library (VTL) solution. That already …

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• What’s New with RDi Version 9.6.0.7

  March 11, 2020 Alex Woodie

  IBM last month unveiled Rational Developer for i (RDi) version 9.6.0.7, the first release of the popular IBM i development environment in about a year. With this release, IBM is giving developers a handful of new capabilities, including the ability to create procedures out of pieces of code, as well as the ability to test incoming parameters.

  RDi is IBM’s flagship integrated development environment (IDE) for the IBM i platform. The product isn’t universally used across the IBM i community, and it’s not free. But many IBM i professionals swear by the graphical and modern IDE, particularly compared to older …

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• Why You Should Join A Local User Group?

  February 4, 2019 Dawn May

  Here’s a good question: Why should you want to join a local user group?

  You can communicate with colleagues via email or instant messages. A wide array of social networks, such as Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, and others, provide a way to share information. Internet searches allow you to find documentation and articles. While the interconnected world provides access to large amounts of information, you also have to determine if the information you find is accurate. Of course, you can trust information from IBM web sites, but what about posts on social media? Are they always right? I’m sure you’ve heard …

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• All i Want For Christmas Is RDi Lite

  December 12, 2018 Alex Woodie

  All some IBM i community members wanted for the holidays was RDi Lite. Instead, they’re looking at IBM like the Grinch due to its decision not to offer a free, scaled-down version of the application development tool. What’s more, the community is expressing great displeasure at the manner in which IBM handled the matter through its Request for Enhancement (RFE) process.

  Hassan Farooqi kicked off the campaign for RDi Lite in August 2017, when he posted an RFE on the new IBM developerWorks website that’s designed to facilitate collaboration with its user communities by allowing them to submit ideas for …

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• What Is Happening With RFEs For IBM i?

  October 29, 2018 Alex Woodie

  IBM customers have been encouraged to vote on product enhancements for over a year as part of the Request for Enhancement (RFE) process, and a number of new features have actually made it into IBM i technology refreshes (TRs). What new or improved IBM i functionality will Big Blue work on next?

  It’s hard to say exactly which RFE items will strike a chord with IBM product managers, since the requests can be all over the board and impact a range of components, from the IBM i OS itself and the Db2 for i database to Access Client Solutions (ACS) …

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• The Five Hottest IBM i RFEs Of The Quarter

  April 2, 2018 Alex Woodie

  You should know by now that IBM wants your input on new features for IBM i. Anybody with a valid IBM ID can submit their ideas – anything, really – through the new Request for Enhancement (RFE) process it put in place over a year ago. Now that the first quarter of 2018 is officially in the books, it’s a good time to check in with the RFE submissions and see kind of new stuff IBM i users have dreamt up to enhance the midrange server platform at the center of this community.

  Here are the top five new RFEs, …

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• Top Ten New IBM i RFEs

  May 22, 2017 Alex Woodie

  Should IBM open source its database drivers, or add support for .NET? Should it add the latest SSL ciphers to IBM i 7.1? These are some of the changes that it has received through its new Web-based requests for enhancement (RFE) program on its developerWorks site.

  The new RFE functionality is only a few months old, but it’s already attracting the attention of IBM i professionals who want IBM to change things about the stack. It’s also getting attention from other IBM i pros who get to vote on them.

  Here are the top ten RFEs so far, ranked by …

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• Vote On New IBM i Functionality With RFE Community Program

  March 15, 2017 Alex Woodie

  IBM is rolling out a new program that will not only allow IBM i customers to submit requests for enhancements (RFEs) over the Web, but allow the IBM i community to vote on them. Dubbed IBM RFE Community, the developerWorks program provides another venue for informing the Rochester Lab about a problem or asking them to build a new feature into the IBM i product.

  The new IBM RFE Community program for IBM i, which we told you was coming last August, is based on other RFE programs the company has had in place for other software products. Armed …

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• What’s Wrong With Modern RPG?

  February 27, 2017 Dan Burger

  IBM continues to enhance RPG. If it wasn’t being improved on a regular basis, there would be cause for concern, but some people find cause for concern in everything. Satisfaction is on the other side of the fence, even after they’ve crossed the fence. That’s not an endorsement for “If you don’t have anything nice to say, don’t say anything at all.” There’s always room for constructive criticism and honest assessments of the circumstances.

  That brings us to the RPG enhancements in the recently announced Technology Refresh identified as IBM i 7.2 TR 6 and IBM i 7.3 TR …

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