• ALL400s Survey Paints a Picture of IBM i Community

  April 20, 2022 Alex Woodie

  It’s been three years since John Rockwell ran an ALL400s survey, which he periodically ran several times before. At the urging of members of the IBM i community, Rockwell recently ran another survey, and he shared his conclusions with IT Jungle.

  At first glance, the results of the latest ALL400s survey, which includes responses from more than 600 people, shows what you might expect. For starters, we all know the IBM i community is getting older, with retirements looming for some. That shouldn’t come as a surprise. But as one drills down into the results themselves, a more nuanced …

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• REPL Tool Gives RPG Developers Immediate Feedback

  April 20, 2022 Alex Woodie

  If you’ve ever wanted to quickly know what a small snippet of RPG code does but do not want to take the time to compile a test program and go through the debugging process, then you might be interested in rpgle-repl, a new open source Read-Evaluate-Print-Loop (REPL) utility that was recently shared with the IBM i community.

  Tom Sharp, a senior developer at a financial software provider in the UK, says he created rpgle-repl after receiving numerous requests from his colleagues about what particular pieces of RPG code actually did.

  “The first place to check would always be the IBM …

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• Connectria, Now A Top AWS Partner, Primed For Hybrid Push

  April 13, 2022 Alex Woodie

  Amazon Web Services has lots and lots of servers and storage — enough to supply the IT needs of more than 1 million customers around the world, including one rather large e-commerce site. The cloud giant also has more than 125,000 business partners helping it to scale out to meet those customer needs. Now, thanks to a recent promotion, IBM i hosting specialist Connectria won’t get lost in the AWS partnership jungle.

  Last week, Connectria announced that AWS has named it a Premier Consulting Partner, the highest echelon in the AWS Partner Network. With just 120 members, the move into …

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• Thoroughly Modern: Improving The Digital Experience With APIs

  April 11, 2022 Marcel Sarrasin

  The world is an ever-changing place, and that means there is always something new that needs to be done to either improve applications running on the IBM i platform or to integrate them with other applications or interfaces on new kinds of devices. This is an important aspect of modernization, and one that often bridges the back-end databases and applications and the front-end interfaces through which end users access those applications – both of which need to be modernized, and often independently.

  This is made possible by having application programming interfaces, or APIs, and if IBM i customers have tens …

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• How Kyndryl’s IBM i Customer Base Benefits from the Big Blue Split

  March 30, 2022 Alex Woodie

  Now that IBM is done with the spin-out of its Global Technology Services (GTS) business, the company that resulted from that spin-out, Kyndryl, is free to pursue its own strategy. For Kyndryl’s considerable IBM i installed base, that freedom will result in a much broader array of technological options and services engagements becoming available to them.

  With 500 employees dedicated to supporting its IBM i customers, Kyndryl has one of the biggest IBM i services practices in the world, says Nicolas Le Van Dé, Kyndryl’s IBM i global offering manager.

  “I think we are the leader in terms of IBM …

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• IBM i Modernization – Life After RPG

  March 30, 2022 Jose Caso Jacobs

  How an IBM i business approaches legacy application modernization doesn’t differ from application modernization on any other platform. Well, there is one slight difference. Many of those IBM i businesses have the added weight of replacing working legacy applications for the simple fact that RPG fell out of mainstream coding decades ago. The code is efficient and perfectly runs mission-critical apps, but there are fewer and fewer programmers around to maintain that code.

  Colleges and universities stopped teaching RPG before Y2K was even a concern. Developers that learned RPG in the 1980s and early 1990s were 30 or 40 years …

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• Inside Jack Henry’s Long-Term Modernization Roadmap

  March 28, 2022 Alex Woodie

  Jack Henry & Associates is one of the stalwart brands for IBM i applications. The Monett, Missouri, company has more than 1,000 banks and credit unions running its core banking systems on IBM i, with another 650 on AIX and a few hundred more on Windows Server. So when the company last month officially unveiled its next-generation technology strategy, it turned a few heads.

  As it turns out, Jack Henry has been working on its new tech stack for the past five years. As the company sussed out the strategy and the first products were born – an application for …

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• Rocket Launches New DevOps Solution for IBM i

  March 23, 2022 Alex Woodie

  Rocket Software last week took the covers off a newly branded solution aimed at bringing IBM i development processes into the future. Dubbed Rocket DevOps, the offering is based on the existing Rocket Aldon offering and is designed to enable IBM i shops to adopt the latest CI/CD development and operations practices. The suite also will welcome a new testing solution next month.

  Rocket DevOps was created to be a soup-to-nuts DevOps solutions that gives development and delivery teams everything they need to develop and deploy high quality and secure IBM i code in an efficient manner. In addition to …

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• Remain Unifies Its Products with New Framework, Dubbed ‘Octo’

  March 16, 2022 Alex Woodie

  The folks at Remain Software have been cranking out the code all winter, and the fruits of their labor are now here for all to view. Chief among the new deliverables is Octo, which the Dutch company describes as a Web-based orchestration layer and framework that will unite its various products and provide a common dashboard. Updates of other products, including the flagship TD/OMS offering, are now available, too.

  The headliner for Remain Software’s second milestone delivery of the current release cycle (which spans from summer to summer) arguably is Octo. Short for Open Core for Technology Orchestration, Octo …

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• Git Is A Whole Lot More Than A Code Repository

  March 16, 2022 Jeff Tickner

  It is funny to think that two of the most transformative technologies to hit the datacenter in the past several decades are based on projects created by Linus Torvalds. The first, of course, is the Linux kernel, which is the heart of the Linux operating system and which first rolled out in 1991 but didn’t become a real server-class platform until the Dot Com Boom in the late 1990s. The second thing that Torvalds created, out of necessity to help better manage the development and patching of the open source Linux kernel, was the Git repository and version control system. …

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