• Jack Henry Reiterates IBM i Support “For The Foreseeable Future”

  July 31, 2023 Alex Woodie

  Jack Henry & Associates has been tied to the IBM i and its predecessor platforms for its entire life. The company’s flagship RPG-based product for community banks, Silverlake, is the same name IBM used for its AS/400 development project. And while Jack Henry is developing applications in other technologies and other platforms, the IBM i will be supported for the foreseeable future, the company says.

  Like many companies in the IBM i ecosystem today, Jack Henry has a modernization strategy, and that modernization strategy involves several, interrelated components.

  For starters, the company wants to move away from the old style …

  Read more

• SoCal Gears Up for OCEAN Tech Con 23

  July 17, 2023 Alex Woodie

  Southern California’s IBM i community is getting ready for the biggest event on its calendar: OCEAN Tech Con 23. The three-day, in-person event kicks off next week with a full slate of speakers and presenters who will discuss the latest advances in the platform.

  The OCEAN user group’s annual summer soiree starts the morning of Thursday, July 27, with a one-hour keynote by IBM’s IBM i chief technology officer, chief architect, and distinguished engineer Steve Will. The title of the address, “IBM i @ 35: integrate + innovate,” gives you an idea what Will will talk about.

  The educational component …

  Read more

• Guru: Comparing IFS Directories Using SQL

  June 19, 2023 Mike Larsen

  I use SQL almost every day at my job. It may be just a query in ACS, or it may be embedded SQL in an RPG program. A few days ago, I needed to compare the contents of one IFS directory to another. Combining a few different table functions, I was able to develop a nice solution.

  Note: The code for this article can be downloaded here.

  In this example, I have a directory that has five text files in it. I have a second directory that has three text files in it, and they are the same documents …

  Read more

• Thoroughly Modern: Proven Strategies For Innovating IT And IBM i In A Digital Age

  June 12, 2023 Chris Koppe

  Over the past 20 years I’ve worked with countless organizations on their IBM i modernization and transformation strategies, enabling them to harness the value derived from their mission-critical applications. Transforming outdated RPG, COBOL and CA 2E (SYNON) applications not only lowers costs and mitigates risks, but it also unlocks new capabilities to innovate and future-proof your business. How are today’s organizations focusing their modernization and transformation efforts? Where should you start?

  What is Driving Innovation On IBM i?

  It’s important to begin by examining IT’s role in innovation. Over my 35+ years in the industry, I’ve worked with dozens …

  Read more

• Guru: Speeding Up RPG By Reducing I/O Operations, Part 2

  June 12, 2023 Gregory Simmons

  Legacy code. Often one admits they have legacy code either with a chuckle or a wince. Nonetheless, it usually is admitted with bad connotations. We must remember though – legacy code becomes legacy code because it works. It performs its tasks day in and day out for many years and is forgotten about. Only the squeaky wheel gets the grease, right?

  The problem with this code is that, while it works, decades slip by, and technology evolves. As these decades roll along, we don’t just end up with a few programs that fit this ‘legacy code’ stereotype, we often end …

  Read more

• SBOMs Will Come to IBM i, Eventually

  June 7, 2023 Alex Woodie

  The Biden Administration’s push to make software bills of material (SBOMs) mandatory may not be moving ahead as quickly as hoped. But the SBOM requirement is still marching ahead for federal agencies and the vendors who supply them with software – running on IBM i or any other platform – with a major self-attestation deadline.

  The federal government’s SBOM push began back in 2018, when the National Telecommunications and Information Administration’s (NTIA), an agency within the Department of Commerce, spearheaded SBOM work with private-sector partners in an attempt to get better visibility into security vulnerabilities.

  The SBOM movement got a …

  Read more

• Guru: Watch Out For This Pitfall When Working With Integer Columns

  May 22, 2023 Gregory Simmons

  Remember that awesome jungle game where you had to guide the hero through a series of increasingly hard obstacles to gather treasure? Jumping over snakes, scorpions, and rolling logs, swinging on vines over alligators –your timing had to be just right. Pitfall Harry survived in a world of 255 screens, each of which were 160 x 192 pixels and a dazzling 128 colors! Well today, I want to make you aware of a pitfall which caught me off guard a while back. I hope this article will help you avoid my pitfall.

  There I was, writing my code, happy as …

  Read more

• Remain Launches AI Chatbot to Assist with Development on RDi

  May 17, 2023 Alex Woodie

  Developers who code in Eclipse-based environments such as Rational Developer for i (RDi) now have access to Ai Chat, a free ChatGPT-based chatbot launched last month by Remain Software. According to Remain CTO Wim Jongman, the coding copilot displays the programming chops of a seasoned RPG developer.

  The AI revolution continues to unfold at an unprecedented clip, driven in large part by large language models (LLMs) such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Google’s Bard, and Facebook’s LLaMA, among others. Trained on massive corpuses of data culled from the Internet, these LLMs “learn” what words are likely to go with one another, …

  Read more

• Inside IBM’s Efforts To Modernize The ISV Army

  May 15, 2023 Alex Woodie

  “You go to war with the army you have, not the army you might want or wish to have at a later time.” IBM executives must feel a bit like the eminently quotable Don Rumsfeld, former Secretary of the Department of Defense, as they marshal their assets in the battle for application supremacy. While some of Big Blue’s partners have honed their IBM i applications into modern weapons, others are fielding old equipment more suitable for a previous war.

  It’s no state secret that Big Blue has a legacy problem on its hands in the IBM i world. When the …

  Read more

• Thoroughly Modern: Unlocking the Full Potential Of Your IBM i Applications

  May 15, 2023 Greg Patterson

  IBM i is the backbone of mission critical applications for over 120,000 customers worldwide in every conceivable industry and company size, particularly with companies ranging from $50 million to $1 billion in annual revenues and specializing in manufacturing, distribution, financial services, and healthcare. In other words, IBM i supports a significant share of the global economy.

  Although the IBM i platform is very productive, there are many things we can do to modernize our applications and provide more value to the business. But this is easier said than done. Some of the biggest challenges that that we face relate to …

  Read more

Previous Articles Next Articles