• Guru: Fall Brings New RPG Features, Part 3

  January 18, 2021 Jon Paris

  In my previous tips (see Related Stories below), I covered the new BIFs and op-code options added with this release. This time I’m going to discuss a couple of new compiler options that focus on the conversion of character data to numeric.

  While you may not have needed these capabilities to date, it is highly likely that you will in the near future. Why? Because of the rapid growth in the use of web services in the IBM i world. I don’t think I have talked to a single client in the last 12 months who was not already providing …

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• ARCAD Plugs IBM i DevOps Suite Into Microsoft Azure

  January 18, 2021 Alex Woodie

  IBM i developers can now leverage a collection of DevOps tools on the Microsoft Azure cloud platform, courtesy of a new integration announced in December 2020 by ARCAD Software.

  Azure DevOps is an end-to-end DevOps environment that provides a range of project management services for developers who are building software to deploy on Azure or other platforms.

  Microsoft ostensibly introduced the software as a service (SaaS) offering back in October 2018. But in reality, Azure DevOps is the latest name of a product that can trace its lineage back to 2006, when Microsoft launched Visual Studio Team System.

  Through its …

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• 2021 Predictions for IBM i, Part 1

  January 13, 2021 Alex Woodie

  With an eventful 2020 thankfully in the rearview mirror, it’s time to start thinking about what 2021 might have in store for us. The IBM i community, like most of the world, could use a little bit of hope at the moment. We asked IBM i community leaders to deliver predictions, and they responded.

  Liam Allan, who is a consultant at Seiden Group and the creator of ILE Editor, has a couple of predictions for IT Jungle.

  “My focus is mainly software. I do still predict Node.js gaining traction on IBM i,” Allan writes. “The tooling is really …

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• Seiden Group Unveils A PHP Distro For IBM i

  January 11, 2021 Alex Woodie

  IBM i shops that are looking for PHP alternatives on IBM i may be interested to know that Seiden Group is now distributing and supporting its own PHP distribution. Called CommunityPlus+, the PHP runtime is distributed via RPM, includes a slew of components (including Db2 database connectors), and is available with technical support, if desired.

  Seiden Group’s free CommunityPlus+ distribution is a PHP runtime for software written in PHP versions 7.3 and 7.4, with support for PHP 8.0 coming soon. The software runs in the IBM i PASE environment in 64-bit mode, and includes a slew of database drivers, …

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• Guru: Fall Brings New RPG Features, Part 2

  January 11, 2021 Jon Paris

  In my previous tip I outlined some of the new features added to RPG with the Fall 2020 release. In this and the following tip I will be covering the features that I ran out of space for in that first one.

  This time I will cover the new FOR-EACH loop construct. I have wanted this in RPG ever since encountering it in PHP. Simply put, it automatically iterates through an array, “serving up” one element at a time. When I say “an array” I mean any kind of array, including data structure arrays, dynamic arrays and even the new …

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• Let IT Flow: The Benefits Of Endless Modernization

  January 4, 2021 Alex Woodie

  The “big bang” approach has been falling out of favor for some time in the world of IT project management. Now, according to new research from Micro Focus, organizations that embrace the concepts of continual improvement, or “endless modernization,” of legacy applications achieve better results than those that attempt a wholesale replacement or a full rewrite of them.

  The research was conducted by Standish Group, which Micro Focus contracted to write Endless Modernization: How Infinite Flow Keeps Software Fresh, which was released in early December. The study builds on Standish’s longstanding Chaos Report series, which seeks to document …

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• The Prickly Pear Of Auto ID For IBM i

  December 16, 2020 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Good companies can batten down the hatches and pilot their enterprise through rough economic waters, but great companies identify opportunities and successfully pursue them whether or not times are good or bad. It takes a bit of pliability to be adaptable enough to not just accept change, but to embrace it, and also to be certain enough of your company and its customers to build a core user base and just serve those customers relentlessly with steady improvements. This is a tough balancing act, but if you look at the case studies, you find this balance is what gives companies …

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• VS Code Provides Another Coding Option for IBM i

  December 9, 2020 Alex Woodie

  IBM i shops that are looking for an alternative to IBM’s Rational Developer for IBM i (RDi) may want to check out a lightweight code editor from Microsoft called Visual Studio Code (VS Code). Thanks to extensions for IBM i languages developed by the opensource community, VS Code can support native development in RPG, CL, and SQL.

  First released by Microsoft in 2015, VS Code provides a basic environment for writing and editing code. It features debugging, syntax highlighting, intelligent code completion, snippets, and code refactoring, as well as embedded Git. It runs on Windows, Linux, and Mac, and while …

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• COMMON Launches Focus, A Live Educational Series

  December 9, 2020 Alex Woodie

  COMMON yesterday kicked off the latest virtual event during this social distanced year of COVID-19. Focus is a series of half-day workshops on IBM i topics that is taking place through December 17. It’s a live event, which is good, but best of all, it’s free — as long as you are a current COMMON member.

  Focus consists of 18 half-day sessions across eight topic areas that are taking place this week (Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday) and the same days next week. The sessions, which kick off each day at 1 p.m. CT, are presented live by real live IBM …

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• Thoroughly Modern: What’s New With PHP On IBM i?

  December 7, 2020 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  If you use PHP on IBM i, you’ve likely seen some recent announcements about some great changes coming to the open-source language. According to the latest blog post from Zend on PHP 8, there are a number of new functions being introduced including str_contains, str_starts_with, and str_ends_with, preg_last_error_msg and get_debug_type. In addition, the core PHP 8 engine has many new features, optimizations and improvements in the type system, error handling, and consistency. The key areas include:

  • JIT Compiler
  • Fatal errors on incompatible method signatures
  • LSP Enforcement
  • Resource “Classes”
  • Assertion behavior
  • XML-RPC is now in PECL
  • Reflection changes

  This is …

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