• Keep The IBM i Youth Movement Going With More Training, Better Tools

  June 9, 2025 Alex Woodie

  Nobody is going to mistake an IBM i conference for a college campus anytime soon. But if the recent POWERUp 2025 conference at Disneyland was any indication, there is a definite trend toward younger professionals working on the platform. While the IBM i youth movement is real, companies will benefit from some simple ways to attract and retain these new IBM i professionals.

  IBM is still working to get IBM i content back into four-year universities through the Power Skills Academy, which has been a struggle. Colleges are reluctant to invest in building a curriculum based on technologies that they …

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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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• How To Have The Wisdom Of Experts Woven Into Your Code

  October 14, 2024 Nicholas DeLessio

  No matter how far you are down the road with your DevOps automation journey, or even if you’re not yet starting that journey, it’s probably a good idea to have a code checker; not everyone can have a Linus Torvalds review their work (as famously happens with the open source Linux kernel), but there are automation tools available for various languages and platforms that do static code analysis and they are the next best thing.

  These tools, sometimes called “code linters” (because they remove the fuzzy bits out of application logic like actual linters remove imperfections stuck to our clothing), …

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• Open Source IBM i Build Tool Now Supports VS Code

  July 24, 2024 Alex Woodie

  A new release of the open source iBuild tool now supports VS Code, the developer of the tool recently announced. The new release also now fully supports ILE, which is critical to the future of the IBM i platform, the iBuild creator says.

  iBuild is a free build tool that automates the task of running all of a developer’s RPG source code through the IBM compilers. It’s been in active development for about eight years and can be downloaded from sourceforge.net/projects/ibuild.

  What makes iBuild unique is that it puts instructions on how to build objects into the header of …

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• Guru: Web Concepts For The RPG Developer, Part 1

  April 22, 2024 Chris Ringer

  Way back in the 1990s, I recall accessing data with only RPG III F-Specs. But nowadays some of that critical data may live in the cloud. The good news is tools like HTTPAPI and RXS and SQL functions like SQL HTTP are available to access that remote data from the IBM i. But what you may not know is how to actually format components in those HTTP requests.

  Here I will discuss some techniques to build those components in an HTTP request before sending it across the web.

  HTTP Get Versus Post

  The two most common methods for an HTTP …

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• How Long Before Big Blue Brings Code Assist To IBM i?

  August 23, 2023 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  IBM Research and Big Blue’s Software group have been collaborating to bring generative AI capabilities to market through the Watsonx stack of large language models and related tools. Watsonx is a basis for customers to create customized LLMs based on data from their own businesses and to integrate the quasi-cognitive capabilities of LLMs into their applications.

  Watsonx is also being used by IBM to augment some tools of its own, and the most recent one that will be in tech preview in September and generally available sometime in the fourth quarter is called Watsonx Code Assistant for Z, which as …

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• It Is Time To Have A Group Chat About AI

  January 23, 2023 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  The first rule of any technology is that is can be used for good or evil, but generally it is used for something vaguely in between. The second rule, rarely used, is that some technologies need to be tightly controlled because of the global-scale damage they can cause. Nuclear fission and nuclear fusion come immediately to mind. And so does the special branch of machine learning called deep learning, which most people call AI training these days.

  I can’t remember precisely when I first started writing about AI training and the neural networks and frameworks underneath them, but I wrote …

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• JD Edwards Customers Face Support Decisions

  August 3, 2022 Alex Woodie

  JD Edwards was the gold standard for ERP software on the IBM midrange server for many years. But with end-of-support dates looming from Oracle, many JD Edwards customers – especially users of the World package – must make some decisions about the future of their ERP system.

  In April, as it has planned for years, Oracle ceased providing premiere support for JD Edwards World, the older, RPG-based ERP package originally developed. This marks the first time in decades that the World product is not under mainstream support from its owner.

  However, the software giant will continue to honor extended support …

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• A Frank Solstice

  June 20, 2022 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  When you are born in Minnesota, the seasons matter. Unfortunately, as Frank Soltis, the former chief architect of the AS/400 system and the creator of the single-level storage architecture of the System/38 and the AS/400 that is still a marvel, once quipped to us: “There are only two seasons in Minnesota: Winter, and Getting Ready For Winter.”

  And so, you have two options: Play hockey when you aren’t farming, or design excellent computer systems. That’s how supercomputer genius Seymour Cray did it from nearby Wisconsin.

  The AS/400 for which this publication was founded 33 years ago was born on the …

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• The State Of The IBM i Base 2022: Third Party Software Conundrum

  April 11, 2022 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Aside from death, most problems are not intractable. But people surely can be, and sometimes are. But luckily not often, and the thing about people is that, generally speaking, they can be reasonable when they are reasoned with. It is with all of this in mind that we come to the next in the State of IBM i Base stories for 2022, where we want to talk about the software trap that the remaining OS/400, i5/OS, and some IBM i shops have gotten themselves into and how we might help them get out of it to the mutual benefit of …

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