• Thoroughly Modern: Running CA 2E Applications? It’s Time To Modernize The UI

  March 8, 2021 Nick Hampson and Scott Gingerysty

  While CA 2E, formerly known as Synon, isn’t discussed as frequently in the IBM i space as RPG or COBOL, customers tell us that it provides tremendous value and competitive differentiation for their organization. In many cases, these applications have been reliably running mission-critical business applications for decades.

  However, Synon also comes with risks, such as a shrinking pool of Synon resources. Classically trained Synon programmers are scarce and most programmers who are working with Synon today have picked it up from someone else. Sure, they can build a business application, but when they go outside the basics of the …

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• Guru: SELECT INTO And Arrays

  March 8, 2021 Ted Holt

  I got egg on my face again. I told a couple of colleagues that they could use the SELECT INTO statement to load multiple rows into an array data structure in an RPG program. Boy, was I wrong! I had confused SELECT INTO with the FETCH statement, of course, which retrieves data over which a cursor has been declared.

  But the matter continued to nag me. I much like the simplicity of SELECT INTO. There’s no cursor to declare, open, fetch from and close, the same reason I like the FOR loop in SQL PL. It seemed (and continues …

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• Why Open Source Is Critical for Digital Transformation

  March 3, 2021 Alex Woodie

  In 2019, digital transformation seemed like the latest buzzword to come out of the hype-heavy technology business. But in 2020, as the COVID-19 pandemic upturned life as we know it, the idea took on new importance. For IBM i shops looking to stay alive in competitive markets, digital transformation is now a requirement. And according to IBM’s Jesse Gorzinski, the digital transformation path runs squarely through open source.

  2020 was a bizarre year in many ways. But there’s no doubt that it was a watershed year for open source on IBM i, with the delivery of a number of significant …

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• Unit Testing Automation Hits Shift Left Instead of Ctrl-Alt-Delete Cash

  March 3, 2021 Nick Blamey

  In this time of the coronavirus pandemic, with its dual pressures of the uncertainty of the economy at a small and global scale and the fever pitch need to rapidly modernize applications, it is hard to know where to start. Given this scale of change, as a supplier of application modernization tools that are derived from both a strong IBM i heritage and the youth and strength of open source, you might think that ARCAD Software would be most interested in selling customers its entire toolbox.

  Not necessarily – the answer all depends on your starting point. There is an …

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• IBM i 7.1 Extended Out To 2024 And Up To The IBM Cloud

  March 1, 2021 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  In case you have not figured it out, Big Blue has finally figured out that IBM i 7.1 is a wall that a lot of customers can’t get over. Which is something we have been saying for a long time. And to IBM’s credit, it is doing something about it. A bunch of things, as it turns out, and as part of the February 23 announcements last week, IBM did a few more things that will increase the long-term viability of this release.

  IBM i 7.1 went off regular support back on April 30, 2018, which was almost three years …

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• Matillion Founder Recounts Midrange Roots

  February 24, 2021 Alex Woodie

  In the mad rush to build data warehouses in the cloud, there’s one group that’s doing surprisingly well: ETL tool providers. Despite the sophistication of today’s AI and analytic endeavors, ETL tools are a critical link in the chain to the cloud. And one of the up-and-coming vendors in this space is Matillion, which last week raised $100 million in venture capital.

  Matillion was founded in 2011 to help companies build cloud data warehouses. The Anglo-American firm developed expertise in taking companies’ corporate data from on-premise systems and building data warehouse on emerging cloud systems, such as Amazon Web Services’ …

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• The Humongous Investment In IBM i People

  February 8, 2021 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  It has been common knowledge since the Application System/400 minicomputer platform was launched in June 1988 that the vast majority of customers buying these machines either developed their own code in RPG or COBOL – mostly RPG, except in banking and insurance, which had a mainframe heritage and preferred COBOL – or had access to the source code from third parties and heavily customized it to the point where they were self-maintaining the applications at some point. In many cases, they used a mix of homegrown and third party modules and did the integration themselves.

  This history continues, and is …

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• SoftLanding Adds Support for Source Stream Files

  February 3, 2021 Alex Woodie

  IBM i shops developing in a mix of open source and native languages can now manage all of their development projects together in a new release of SoftLanding Systems’ TURNOVER software. The big change that enables that open source support is how SoftLanding adapted its change management software to support stream files on the IFS. The company also took the opportunity to add a new Web interface and rebrand its entire TURNOVER suite of products.

  First, let’s clear up the name changes. TURNOVER Lifecycle Manager is the new name of the change management software that used to go by TURNOVER …

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• COVID-19: A Great Time for Application Modernization

  February 1, 2021 Alex Woodie

  If your IT department has been waiting for the right time to start your digital transformation, then you’re in luck: With hundreds of millions of folks around the world stuck in their homes and largely limited to interacting via the Internet, the COVID-19 pandemic and economic lockdown represents a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to build new digital channels to reach them.

  COVID-19 is taking a brutal toll on our country in terms of lost lives and lost livelihoods. There’s no upside to that, no way to spin that into a positive. But for IBM i shops that, for whatever reason, have resisted …

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• Sometimes Folks Only Learn The Hard Way About Keeping Software Current

  February 1, 2021 Rob McNelly

  School’s been out for me for a very long time, but I still enjoy learning. I gain a sense of satisfaction whenever I learn something new. Specific to technology, exposure to new concepts helps me understand how things work together. I cannot count the number of times where I watched over someone’s shoulder, or watched someone on a shared screen, to learn about a new tool or technique, or a different way to set up my desktop or environment.

  Watching and listening to people is my preferred way to learn, but other forms of education – reading IBM Redbooks and …

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