• Guru: RDi V9.6, Part 10 – Debugger Enhancements

  November 16, 2020 Susan Gantner

  Here I go again – more enhancements to talk about that have come about in RDi V9.6. This time, it’s the debugger that has been enhanced. The 9.6.0.7 fix pack included some new goodies for the debugger.

  Both of the enhanced features were popular Requests for Enhancement (RFEs) — the ability to display very large variable values and the addition of a condition to Service Entry Points (SEPs). These are further proof that the RFE process works. If you haven’t visited the RFE site to vote for your favorite suggested features for RDi, do it now. . . or maybe …

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• IBM Delivered An RDi Update, Too

  November 4, 2020 Alex Woodie

  Next week, IBM is planning to deliver the PTFs that include the functionality contained in the Technology Refreshes it just unveiled for IBM i 7.3 and 7.4 last month. You will want to stay on the lookout for those updates. But some of the capabilities that IBM “announced” in the TRs shipped months ago, including those for Rational Developer for i (RDi).

  The latest release of RDi, or version 9.6.0.8, was included as a feature for IBM i 7.3 TR9 and IBM i 7.4 TR4. IBM, of course, announced those TRs on October 6 and says it plans to …

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• Tech Refresh Brings New RPG Features

  October 26, 2020 Alex Woodie

  There’s no denying that IBM has a soft spot for open source these days, but that doesn’t mean it’s given up on the ILE environment. In fact, IBM gave RPG programmers something to cheer about by including several new features in the language in the latest batch of Technology Refreshes.

  IBM introduced over a dozen new open source capabilities with the IBM i 7.3 TR9 and 7.4 TR3, which IBM unveiled earlier this month and which will ship in a few weeks. That new tech will definitely help IBM i shops tackle their business challenges, says Steve Will, the chief …

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• Choosing The Language To Transform Your Applications

  October 19, 2020 Michael Killian

  Most of our customers are comfortable with RPG since it is the predominant language on the IBM i, and most are familiar with Java and .NET since those languages have been around for two to three decades. But many are not as familiar with Node.js.

  There are a lot of great resources available regarding Node.js, so I thought amalgamating that information into one concise article for ease of reference might be a better use of your time. There are so many resources out there to give context and meaning to Node.js, so I have put together a list of the …

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• Fresche Unveils X-Replay for 5250 Testing

  October 14, 2020 Alex Woodie

  Fresche this week rolled out X-Replay, a new tool designed to automate the testing of 5250 greenscreen applications. Unlike other tools that work on screengrabs or X-Y coordinates, X-Replay software works at the field-name level, which makes test scripts more resilient to change, according to Fresche, which now boasts a complete lineup of IBM i testing tools.

  Fresche has been providing tools for IBM i testing for a while now, mainly with X-Analysis, its cross-reference analysis tool, as well as X-Dataset, which ensures good management and security of data involved in testing. However, when it comes to testing 5250 screens …

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• IBM Brings More Open Source to IBM i

  October 14, 2020 Alex Woodie

  IBM has brought an array of new open source packages to its IBM i operating system with the latest batch of Technology Refreshes, including tools for application developers and systems administrators. It’s all part of IBM’s strategy to keep IBM i on the cutting edge through open source, says IBM’s business architect Jesse Gorzinski.

  Before IBM unveiled IBM i 7.4 TR3 and 7.3 TR9 last week, we’d already written extensively about many the open source package that IBM has brought to the platform. For instance, we told you earlier this year how Apache Kafka and Apache Zookeeper were running on …

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• Db2 And SQL Services Get Upgrades With TRs

  October 12, 2020 Alex Woodie

  Among the biggest enhancements that IBM is bringing to IBM i with the latest batch of Technology Refreshes are new capabilities added to the integrated Db2 database and, specifically, the slew of SQL-based services that retrieve all types of data from the platform for IBM i professionals.

  As we previously told you, IBM has decided to rename SQL Services, which were the collection of pre-defined SQL queries that recreate traditional IBM i commands and sometimes bring something entirely new. The growing gaggle of services (or perhaps it’s a herd?) are now being officially referred to as IBM i services, …

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• Guru: Dynamic Arrays Come To RPG – Limitations, Circumventions, And More

  October 12, 2020 Jon Paris

  In my first two tips in this series I covered the basics of automatic sizing arrays and variable sized arrays. In this final part am going to discuss some of the current limitations in this support and the facilities IBM has put in place to help circumvent them.

  IBM publishes an extensive list of the limitations, but in normal usage only a couple present “real” restrictions in practical terms. If you are curious though, you can find the full list here.

  Limitations

  The first limitation to bear in mind is that, currently, only top-level variables can be defined …

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• Guru: Overloading Subprocedures

  October 5, 2020 Paul Tuohy

  The ability to overload subprocedures in RPG is something I had been waiting for a long, long time. IBM finally made it available through a Technology Refresh (7.4, TR1 or 7.3 TR7). If you are not familiar with the term, overloading (in RPG) is the ability to create multiple subprocedures of the same name with different implementations.

  Let’s have a look at how overloading might benefit us when it comes to writing programs and subprocedures. This is a portion of a prototype copy member that, amongst others, contains the prototypes of these three subprocedures:

  dcl-pr format_from_Date varChar(10) extProc(*dclCase);
    dateIn date(*ISO) 

  …

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• IBM i Tries On a Red Hat

  September 30, 2020 Alex Woodie

  When IBM initiated its $34 billion acquisition of Red Hat in 2018, it was done to prepare Big Blue for the coming wave of innovation around things like containers, AI, clouds, and next-gen workloads. It was generally understood that most of the benefits would accrue in the X86 space. But apparently the plan called for sizable doses of IBM i, AIX, and mainframe, too.

  Last week at COMMON’s virtual POWERUp conference, IBM’s Joe Cropper, who works in Power development and holds the title IBM Master Inventor, laid out how the Red Hat acquisition will benefit IBM i and …

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