• Guru Classic: iSphere Plug-in Expands RSE/RDi Toolset

  January 8, 2020 Susan Gantner

  My series of three Guru tips on the free iSphere plug-in first appeared in 2015. Since I still find that most RDi users haven’t heard of it, I’ve decided to repeat the series as Guru Classics. I’ve made a few updates to this first one in the series due to enhancements made to both RDi and iSphere in the intervening years.

  Followers of my Guru tips know that I’m a big RDi fan. These days I would be lost trying to write or maintain RPG code without things like RDi’s Outline, Error feedback, editor filtering, and Undo. But you know …

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• Guru Classic: Don’t Ignore the View

  January 8, 2020 Paul Tuohy

  Author’s Note: This article was originally published in April 2009. The use of DDL and embedded SQL have come a long way since then but the basic premise of the article still applies. I have removed the embedded SQL example using a SELECT * since this is a style that I no longer recommend (from the point of view of self-documenting code, possible performance gains and breaking old habits of thinking in records). I also changed the example of reformatting a numeric date column to use a DATES table as opposed to functions (a faster and better approach). I removed …

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• Guru 2020: Suggested Resolutions, One Prediction

  January 6, 2020 Ted Holt

  Do you eat candy made of underwear? How are your telepathy and teleportation skills? How long ago did you give up eating? How many choppers are on the family helipad? Is your chauffeur a gorilla? Read about these and other bizarre predictions for 2020 here.

  A new year is invariably accompanied by resolutions and predictions. I don’t intend to make any of either. However, if you’re into making resolutions, I’ve got some suggestions that you can take or leave, as you wish. As for predictions, I’ve got one that can’t miss.

  For RPG programmers who are still looking for …

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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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• Thoroughly Modern: More Than Just A Pretty Face

  December 9, 2019 Greg Patterson and Mike Pavlak

  (Sponsored Content) The most difficult, thorny, and intractable problems can sometimes be effectively addressed, if not outright fixed, by breaking them down into smaller problems that can be addressed tactically while also hewing to a broader and deeper strategic plan.

  That, in a nutshell, is the issue facing most IBM i shops that have not done much application modernization above and beyond pushing the display part of the code to a 5250 green screen emulator or maybe doing a little screen scraping to gussy it up a little bit. The reality is there are still an awful lot …

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• Guru: More End Of Year Feedback

  December 9, 2019 Ted Holt

  You are busy. The people you serve need you to do more than one human being can do. You don’t have time to look for comments or updates to the articles we run in this august publication or any other. For this reason, I was pleased to publish some of your feedback in last week’s issue. This week I am pleased to share a bit more.

  In response to Guru: MERGE, Chicken, and Eggs, John asked a good question and made a good point:

  How is using this merge technique under commitment control any different than just doing the …

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• Guru: End Of Year Feedback

  December 2, 2019 Ted Holt

  The year has flown by. Before we know it, it will be 2020. The century is flying by, too. We’ve almost consumed a fifth of it. That seems like a good excuse to see what we might glean from some of your feedback. It’s been a while. More to come next week!

  Several readers wrote regarding the need to remove hard-coded values from programs. Jim brought up the problem of compile-time tables and arrays.

  I find cases where data is hard coded (state names, product categories are a few examples) for tables or arrays in dozens of programs.

  I wish …

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• Latest TRs For IBM i Now Available

  November 20, 2019 Alex Woodie

  IBM last week delivered the latest IBM i operating system Technology Refreshes, giving good IBM i boys and girls around the world early Christmas presents in areas like programing, operations, database, and security. Here’s a quick recap of the new stuff in IBM i 7.4 TR1 and 7.3 TR7.

  There were several general enhancements with IBM i 7.4 TR1 and 7.3 TR7. For starters, administrators gained more control over resources available to the Integrated Web Server (the one powered by Apache) with the new capability to install it the Web server in a user-specified sub-system. Admins also get new functions …

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• Microsoft Wants to Migrate Your IBM i Code to Azure

  November 13, 2019 Alex Woodie

  Microsoft is executing a plan with its partner Skytap to bring IBM i into its Azure cloud, as we’ve previously told you about. But another group within the technology giant has plans of its own to migrate IBM i applications to languages that can run natively on X86 servers and integrate more easily with Azure services.

  We caught wind of this group’s code migration plan a month ago when one of the technical specialists in the Microsoft Azure Global Customer Advisory Team (CAT) wrote a blog entry about the work they do. IT Jungle followed up with the IBM i …

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• The All-Knowing, Benevolent Dictator Of Code

  November 6, 2019 Sebastien Julliand

  (Sponsored Content) Not every software project can have an all-knowing benevolent dictator looking through every line of code, and even all projects could have such a person to oversee the quality of the code, there is no reason to not automate as much of this very important code review job as is possible.

  Luckily for IBM i shops, there is such a tool to help with code review, and in that sense, we suppose, you can install rather than hire that all-knowing benevolent dictator of application code. It’s called, appropriately enough, CodeChecker, and it has been available from ARCAD Software …

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