• Guru: WCA4i And Granite – Because You’ve Got Bigger Things To Build

  September 15, 2025 Gregory Simmons

  They said AI would change everything. Then most of it turned into chatbot demos and marketing decks. But watsonX Code Assistant for i (WCA4i for short), backed by IBM’s own Granite large language model, is doing something IBM i developers might actually care about: Helping you understand, transform, and evolve legacy code without tossing decades of business logic into the fire.

  WCA4i isn’t trying to slap a web UI over your green screens or auto-generate JavaScript for the sake of buzzwords. It’s aimed at something deeper – leveraging an AI foundation model that’s actually trained on IBM i code and …

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• AI Is Coming for ERP. How Will IBM i Respond?

  September 8, 2025 Alex Woodie

  A wave of artificial intelligence is beginning to wash over the enterprise resource planning software market, changing the nature of how businesses process automation gets done. IBM i has been a solid platform for running ERP systems for decades. But how will the new generation of AI-enabled enterprise apps get to IBM i?

  When it comes to automating business processes, ERP packages have been the primary means for achieving it for the past four decades. The big monolithic apps from SAP, Oracle, Infor, and dozens of others have driven trillions of dollars in value by providing a …

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• New DbToo SDK Hooks RPG And Db2 For i To External Services

  August 25, 2025 Alex Woodie

  A team of open source developers led by IBM’s Jesse Gorzinski have developed an experimental new software development kit (SDK) designed to integrate RPG applications and Db2 for i data with external services. The SDK, dubbed DbToo, initially targets watsonx, Ollama, OpenAI endpoints, Kafka, Slack, and Twilio, providing another option for integrating IBM i with popular AI models and messaging services.

  The mainstream IT world is currently evolving at a tremendous pace, largely driven by open source big data projects as well as large language models (LLMs) that promise to automate a range of functions currently performed by humans. The …

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• Guru: Decoding Base64 ASCII

  August 18, 2025 Chris Ringer

  A co-worker of mine recently asked me how to decode a base64 ASCII string in RPG, received from an HTTP response. My response was “that’s easy”, simply use the relevant SQL function BASE64_DECODE. I promptly wrote some sample code and after some debugging I realized this function threw me a curveball.

  Let me demonstrate the issue and offer a simple solution.

  01 **Free
  02 ctl-opt DftActGrp(*No) Copyright('(C) Chris Ringer');
  
  03 dcl-s string_UTF8   varchar(1000) ccsid(*UTF8);
  04 dcl-s base64_UTF8   varchar(1350) ccsid(*UTF8);
  05 dcl-s decoded_UTF8  varchar(1000) ccsid(*UTF8);
  06 dcl-s decoded_Hex   varchar(1000) ccsid(*HEX);
  
  07 Exec SQL Set Option Commit=*NONE, Naming=*SYS;
  08 string_UTF8 = 

  …

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• You Can Now Get IBM Tech Support For VS Code For i

  August 11, 2025 Alex Woodie

  IBM i shops that were on the fence about migrating from Rational Developer for i and adopting VS Code for RPG and COBOL development just received one big reason why they should bite the bullet and make the move: the launch of a new technical support package for Code for i from IBM.

  Visual Studio Code is currently the most popular integrated development environment (IDE) on planet Earth, according to multiple measures, such as the Stack Overflow’s 2025 Developer Survey, which found Microsoft VS Code was used by 76 percent of all respondents, more than twice the usage of …

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• Profound Logic Adds MCP To IBM i AI Tool

  July 28, 2025 Alex Woodie

  The world of AI is moving extremely fast right now, with new models, techniques, and technologies emerging every week. One of the newest bits of AI tech to catch on is Anthropic’s Model Context Protocol (MCP), which has quickly become a defacto standard for connecting data sources to AI models. Profound Logic, which has been on the cutting edge of AI, is the first IBM i vendor to bring MCP support to the server and the Db2 for i database.

  Anthropic quietly launched Model Context Protocol in late November 2024 as a way to enable large language models (LLMs), such …

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• Guru: A Faster Way To Sign A JWT

  July 21, 2025 Chris Ringer

  In my prior article, which you can read here, I discussed using the OpenSSL tool to asymmetrically sign a JWT. I like OpenSSL because it’s an open source solution available on many platforms and easy to use. But the decision to use OpenSSL should be coupled with the performance level expectations (the PLA) for your project.

  For instance, how many tokens will you need to create in a given interval? Will your newly minted tokens expire 24 hours from now or in 5 minutes? In my case currently, only about 5 JWTs are needed per day so …

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• Guru: When Procedure Driven RPG Really Works

  July 14, 2025 Gregory Simmons

  In the vast and varied ecosystems of Earth, few interactions between species have captured the imagination of scientists and casual observers alike as much as the relationship between bottlenose dolphins and puffer fish. This curious dance, often involving the deliberate provocation of the puffer fish to trigger its natural defense mechanism, has led to many interpretations – from simple play to speculative pharmacological experimentation. I submit to you today, that in the digital ocean of RPG development, developers should interact with their procedures in ways that, to the outside eye, might seem equally cryptic, yet are deeply intentional, meticulously orchestrated, …

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• Izzi Buys CNX, Eyes Valence Port To System Z

  July 8, 2025 Alex Woodie

  Izzi Software today announced the acquisition of CNX Corp., owner of the Valence suite of Web development tools for IBM i. The deal is the first IBM i-related acquisition for Izzi, which was founded last year with a mandate to buy smaller IBM i and mainframe vendors that typically don’t get M&A attention from bigger players.

  CNX is a Chicago-based software vendor and consulting firm founded in 1996 by Richard Milone and Robert Swanson. The two had worked with BPCS (now Infor ERP LX) customers, and developed a product that extended that ERP system to the Web. That product, then …

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• 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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