• IBM Completes Migration of Knowledge Center to IBM Documentation

  April 7, 2021 Alex Woodie

  For years, the IBM Knowledge Center has been the go-to place to get technical information about how things work in IBM i. Got a question about RPG opcodes or ALLOBJ authority? The Knowledge Center was the place for you. As part of its broader overhaul of its online resources and properties, IBM recently completed the migration of its Knowledge Center to the new site, called IBM Documentation.

  IBM i professionals can find all of the content they have grown accustomed to finding at the Knowledge Center on the new IBM Documentation site, which can be found at www.ibm.com/docs/en. There …

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• Guru: Web Services, DATA-INTO and DATA-GEN, Part 1

  April 5, 2021 Jon Paris

  Many of the “Can you help me with. . . ” communications that cross my desk these days include reference to JSON. Sometimes the questioner is receiving JSON in a file, or has to retrieve it from a web service, or needs to generate JSON in response to a query. While there are many ways to handle these requirements, RPG’s built-in DATA-INTO and DATA-GEN can do a lot of the heavy lifting for you and are quite simple once you understand the basics.

  In this series of tips, I am going to start with a basic example that uses both …

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• It’s Not Always Sunny in ERP Land

  March 31, 2021 Alex Woodie

  Enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems remain central to company operations. The expansive application suites are heavily relied upon to automate the core business processes that businesses rely on. However, they’re notoriously difficult to implement, and they do not always do what they’re supposed to. And according to a recent survey, they’re often lousy when it comes to providing a return on investment.

  For its Technology Trends 2021 study, Computer Economics polled nearly 200 IT professionals to gauge what types of technologies they’re using, and whether they’re getting a good ROI out of them. When the results were tallied, ERP came …

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• Guru: Stub Testing And SQL

  March 29, 2021 Ted Holt

  A stub program is a program that does nothing but stand in as a place holder for a real program, which may or may not exist yet. I have used them for years to help me test program changes. There are also stub subroutines, stub subprocedures, etc. What I want to talk about today is how to use a similar concept for SQL queries.

  You can use your favorite search engine to learn about stubs, but I’ll give you an example to increase the chances that you’ll know what I’m talking about. Let’s say that I am modifying a CL …

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• OpenShift Provides One Path To IBM i Modernization

  March 29, 2021 Alex Woodie

  The crown jewel in IBM’s $34 billion acquisition of Red Hat arguably is OpenShift, which is a Kubernetes-based container management system for running “cloud-native” applications. While it’s unlikely OpenShift will ever integrate directly with IBM i and its applications, IBM has high hopes the software will help usher in a new wave of application modernization and innovation among IBM i customers.

  IBM Power engineer Joe Cropper laid out the case for IBM i shops to get going with OpenShift two weeks ago during the IBM i Futures conference, which was hosted by COMMON. Cropper, you will remember, made a …

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• What’s In the Top 5 Hottest IBM i RFEs

  March 17, 2021 Alex Woodie

  The IBM i platform’s greatest strength is its committed user base, whose long-lasting loyalty is unique in the annals of the business computer industry. IBM encourages its committed customers to get involved with shaping the future of the platform through the Request for Enhancement (RFE) process, which plays out in the public for all to see.

  IBM’s RFE process also supports the ability for users to submit requests privately, and there are undoubtedly plenty of these requests made. Obviously, we have no insight into these private RFEs (although they would be fun to read). Among the public RFEs, there …

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• Low-Code API Development Gets A Boost From Profound

  March 10, 2021 Alex Woodie

  Profound Logic last week launched Profound API, a new product designed to enable the development and management of RESTful Web services with a minimal amount of coding. The browser-based product works with IBM i programs and data, as well as assets located off the box, and is designed to enable even entry-level IT professionals to get into the API game.

  Application programming interfaces (APIs) have been around for decades. Nearly every developer will call or expose an API at some point in their lives. But APIs have been gaining new momentum lately as a critical layer enabling the future of …

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• 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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