• Now You Can Transform RPG Code Into PHP

  September 21, 2020 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Assuming an average of 5 million lines of code at IBM i shops – a number I heard recently thrown around – in their homegrown or heavily customized third party applications, IBM i shops are collectively sitting on something like 750 billion lines of code. Just ponder that for a minute.

  This code, which is predominantly written in RPG but with a fair proportion of Java and COBOL plus a smattering of more modern languages, is going to have to be maintained and tweaked in the coming years. Just like it had to be updated and debugged time and again …

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• Creating Web Services APIs Can Be Easy On IBM i

  September 16, 2020 Andrew Ireland

  (Sponsored Content) Many IBM i customers are taking a hard look at how they can bring their heritage applications, along with all the significant business value they contain, into a modern world. There are a number of different approaches to do that, and in reality, these methods work together and complement each other. There is no one single route, but rather a combination of approaches that leads to the best results at the lowest cost and the least grief.

  The average IBM i customer has something in the order of five million lines of code that embody their …

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• OpenLegacy Expands Big Data Partnerships

  September 16, 2020 Alex Woodie

  Over the past few months, OpenLegacy has established new partnerships with a handful of tech firms patrolling the big data waters, including Talend, Collibra, and BigID. According to the legacy application modernization specialist, it’s all part of an effort to help its IBM i and mainframe customers upgrade their applications and experiences.

  OpenLegacy is unique among IBM i modernization vendors in its approach. The company’s software allows customers to expose legacy applications, such as those written in RPG, via APIs and Web services.

  Now the company is bringing several partners into that API-driven approach. For instance, its partnership with Talend …

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• Jenkins Gets Closer IBM i Hooks, Courtesy Of ARCAD

  September 14, 2020 Alex Woodie

  For some time, IBM i shops have been behind the curve when it comes to using modern DevOps and continuous integration/continuous delivery (CI/CD) technologies and techniques. ARCAD Software has been working to close that gap through its work with Git and Jenkins, and thanks to its new integration with an enterprise version of Jenkins from CloudBees, the gap is pretty much closed — at least from a technology point of view.

  Jenkins, if you don’t know yet, is a popular open source project that allows DevOps professionals to build, test, and deploy their software as part of a CI/CD …

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• Thoroughly Modern: The Smart Approach to Modernization – Know Before You Go!

  September 14, 2020 Daniel Crépeau

  (Sponsored Content) In today’s rapidly changing digital economy, the ability to keep up, compete and quickly adapt is critical. Every industry, from transportation and logistics to banking, retail, insurance and even manufacturing, is facing business challenges that are forcing them to think about how they can manage change and be ready when disruption occurs.

  Like many others, your organization probably had to evaluate how your systems could adapt to the changes that occurred over the past several months. Here’s an example that you might have seen in your own neighborhood: Restaurant #1 has been developing the ability for …

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• Guru: Qualified Files – Underused and Unappreciated

  September 14, 2020 Ted Holt

  When IBM adds a new feature to the RPG compiler, they do so for a reason. That’s why I try to learn new techniques. I hope they’ll improve the quality of the source code I write. One relatively new feature that I do not see widely used is the qualified file. In the following paragraphs, I’d like to tell you why I like qualified files and how to use them.

  To understand the need for qualified files, it may be good to begin with a brief lesson on the history of the RPG language. When RPG was originally developed, the …

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• A Guide To This Week’s Virtual POWERUp 2020

  September 14, 2020 Alex Woodie

  Sidelined by the COVID-19 epidemic, POWERUp 2020 takes flight today as a virtual conference. COMMON, which is celebrating its 60th birthday this year, has put together hundreds of sessions over the next four days to help its IBM i user base get the latest out of IBM technology. And with many sessions taking place live, there will be lots of chances to go one-on-one.

  In a typical year, POWERUp would be the biggest event on the IBM i schedule, a place to meet a thousand of your closest IBM i friends and get up-to-speed with the latest tech from IBM …

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• CNX Releases Beta of Valence 6.0

  September 2, 2020 Alex Woodie

  CNX last week announced the beta release of Valence 6.0, the newest version of its Web development framework and portal for IBM i. Valence 6.0 brings a whole new look and feel to Web applications created with Valence, as well as updates to administrative functions, the data access layer, and more.

  Valence is a set of tools for creating Web and mobile applications that run under IBM i’s Apache Web server and access existing RPG business logic. The product has several components, including a JavaScript library; a set of RPG procedures for integrating various JavaScript libraries (Ext JS, React, or …

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• 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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• i2Rest Offers Native API Alternative to IWS

  August 19, 2020 Alex Woodie

  IBM i shops that want to expose their RPG applications as industry standard Web services have a few options to choose from. One solution they should keep on their list is i2Rest, which is a native ILE application that exposes RPG using modern OAuth2 and OpenAPI standards.

  We first came across Alexei Baranov’s work back in 2012, when he was involved in the port of the SVN client to IBM i while working at a Moscow, Russia-based consulting firm. Soon thereafter, Baranov started working on developing Web services tools for IBM i.

  The first version of his new Web …

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