• The Gamification Of Good Coding Practices

  February 26, 2020 Nick Blamey

  (Sponsored Content) There are many things that are important about creating good code, but perhaps the most important is the idea that there are good coding practices and that everyone coding, no matter what the programming language and no matter what the type of application they are creating, should adhere to some standards of quality.

  It is often the case that those have spent decades automating different aspects of businesses with systems like the IBM i and its peers have been the most resistant to brining automation to the very work they do in development and operations. But …

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• Guru: Copy OUTQ To PDF

  February 3, 2020 Bob Cozzi

  A long time ago I created a CL command named Copy from OUTQ (CPYOUTQ). This command allowed you to selectively copy spooled files from one OUTQ to either another OUTQ or to the IFS as a PDF or text file. My customers use it all the time for monthly archiving of spooled files and redistribution of output. You may have it on your own system.

  Being one of the handful of original advocates for the so called “Openness APIs” for IBM OS/400 (now IBM i), I quickly embraced the system APIs and have used them extensively throughout the decades. One …

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• Industry Speaks: IBM i Predictions for 2020, Part 1

  January 20, 2020 Alex Woodie

  We are three weeks into 2020, and that New Year smell hasn’t worn off yet. As time rolls on, the IBM i community will certainly get down to business. In the meantime, here are industry predictions from nine community members to read.

  For Alan Seiden, the CEO of Seiden Group and an IBM Champion for Power, risk management will be a common theme for how they approach IT staffing in 2020.

  “IBM i shops have traditionally operated in a lean manner, relying on key individuals who knew their systems intimately,” Seiden says. “Now, with IT staff managing more projects than …

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• The (More) Modern RPG Language

  December 16, 2019 Bob Cozzi

  Back in 1988, I wrote what became the book on RPG III. Then in 1996, I published the RPG IV version and updated it again circa 2000. But in the years that followed, RPG IV became mostly stale; a tweak here and there, but nothing too spectacular.

  In recent years, a wave of RPG IV enhances has been revealed, most notably free-format was completed and helped propel RPG IV, once again into a truly modern language. Although the measure of “modern” for RPG IV seems to lean toward how much free-format syntax is supported; which is ironic considering COBOL and …

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• Guru Classic: The Efficiency of Varying Length Character Variables

  August 14, 2019 Jon Paris

  Remember the bad old days when dinosaurs still roamed the earth and the only way to build strings in RPG involved playing silly games with arrays? Or worse still, obscure combinations of MOVE operations? Thankfully those days are far behind us — although sadly there are still a few RPG/400 dinosaurs coding away!

  RPG IV introduced many powerful new string handling options, such as the %TRIMx family of BIFs, but even now there are capabilities in the language that few programmers fully exploit. One of my favorites is variable length fields. This lack of familiarity made this tip an obvious …

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• Guru Classic: Looking For Commitment, Part 1

  June 19, 2019 Paul Tuohy

  Author’s Note: This set of three articles was originally published in March of 2009. (See links in Related Stories below). As companies look to modernizing their applications, commitment control can play an integral role. In my next three Guru Classic articles, I will be updating the content of these articles for free-form RPG.

  In this article, I will discuss what commitment control is, why you may want to use it, and the basic requirements for commitment control. In subsequent articles, I will look more closely at how commitment control works, different ways in which it can be implemented, …

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• Speaking The SQL Lingua Franca On IBM i

  June 3, 2019 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  No matter what the job is, we all start out somewhere that is pretty far from being an expert and we depend on our elders and mentors to help us learn all the tricks and get good at the work.

  So it is with the nearly ubiquitous database query language, Structured Query Language, or SQL for short. It started out in the head of IBMer Ted Codd back in 1969, which was coincidentally when the System/3 minicomputer launched and its successor many generations later, the System/38 in 1978, was the first IBM system and the first system in the world …

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• Settling In With IBM i For The Long Haul

  February 11, 2019 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  If nothing else, the IBM i platform has exhibited extraordinary longevity. One might even say legendary longevity, if you want to take its history all the way back to the System/3 minicomputer from 1969. This is the real starting point in the AS/400 family tree and this is when Big Blue, for very sound legal and technical and marketing reasons, decided to fork its products to address the unique needs of large enterprises (with the System/360 mainframe and its follow-ons) and small and medium businesses (starting with the System/3 and moving on through the System/34, System/32, System/38, and System/36 in …

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• PASE Versus ILE: Which Is Best For Open Source?

  October 22, 2018 Alex Woodie

  Open source has emerged as a driver of innovation in the past 20 years, and has greatly accelerated technological innovation. The proprietary IBM i platform has also benefited from this trend, thanks in large part to the capability to run Linux applications in the PASE runtime. But some members of the IBM i community are concerned that the fruits of the open source innovation have not tasted quite as sweet as they do on other platforms.

  Linux was the original breakout star in open source software, and so it should be no surprise that the vast majority of software developed …

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• Modern Lessons From A Fresh IBM i Developer

  October 8, 2018 Alex Woodie

  Application modernization is a big nut to crack on IBM i. That is to say, there are many ways to tackle the problem, from the code and business logic to the databases and user interfaces. But when it comes to the type of developers you should look for and how they should spend their time, Kody Robinson has a few pointers that may be worth keeping in mind.

  Robinson was a member of the first batch of “Fresh Faces” that IBM put forward in 2017 to showcase the fact that young people are building careers on the platform, and that …

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