• Remain Breaks New Ground With ALM Suite

  July 15, 2019 Alex Woodie

  Coding season just ended for Remain Software, the Dutch application lifecycle management (ALM) vendor with a growing US presence. That means customers are sorting through a torrent of new functionality in its flagship TD/OMS product, including improved hooks to DevOps tools like Git and Jenkins, a new cross-platform cross-reference module, and a nifty API generator too.

  New stuff started emerging from Remain Software around the POWERUp conference in May, when IT Jungle sat down with company representatives to talk about development trends, current and upcoming releases of Remain’s software, and what customers are looking to get next.

  Arguably the biggest …

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• Guru: Finding Large Files With Python

  July 15, 2019 Mike Larsen

  It’s always a good idea to purge files that aren’t needed any longer. Chances are that you already have procedures in place to purge data from Db2 files and tables, but what about files that reside in the IFS? Do you have a good solution for keeping the IFS clean?

  Perhaps you have old order files stored in the IFS. If you work for a large company, these types of files can accumulate quickly. I’ve written processes in the past to remove files from the IFS using RPG, but I’d like to offer an alternative. I’m going to show how …

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• Eradani Bridges The Gap Between Legacy And Open Source

  July 8, 2019 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  In this publication, legacy is not a dirty word or even remotely pejorative. Rather, “legacy” is just a shorthand way of delineating between applications that encapsulate decades of the evolution of a business and the transactions it processes, and all of the other new stuff that this business is also doing and perhaps coding with newer tools and programming languages.

  A new company, called Eradani, has been founded by some experts in both the IBM i world and the open source world with the express purpose of building a technical bridge so these two different cultures can see a …

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• Guru: One Way To Deal With Two Null Formats

  July 8, 2019 Ted Holt

  Hey, Ted:

  We are building a new system and want to use modern programming and database techniques. I have had quite a time trying to get nulls to act right. It gets confusing fast because RPG handles them differently than the way embedded SQL does. When using SQL for I/O, how do we handle the two null formats?

  — Brian

  There are several ways to go about the “problem” of nulls. Let me give you one simple method, but keep in mind that it’s not the only way.

  First, let’s create a table and put some data into it.

  create 

  …

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• ARCAD Brings Traditional 5250 Development Into DevOps Fold

  June 24, 2019 Alex Woodie

  IBM i developers who embrace modern DevOps techniques typically also use modern development tools, like RDi. Much of the IBM i world uses IBM’s latest development environment, but many have resisted. Now, thanks to new software from ARCAD Software, IBM i developers who work with older tools like PDM can also partake of the benefits of DevOps.

  Getting older IBM i developers on board with the latest tools and techniques is a big priority for ARCAD Software, according to Alexandre Codinach, vice president of Americas for ARCAD Software, which included the new 5250 development capabilities with the launch of …

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• Guru: When %SCAN Isn’t Sufficient

  June 24, 2019 Ted Holt

  The RPG %SCAN built-in function is wonderful! I can still remember having to look for a string within a string using RPG II on System/36. What an ordeal that was! Yet in some situations %SCAN can’t do all I need it to do. In those cases, I rely on the power of SQL.

  One case where SQL comes in handy is when I need a case-insensitive scan. Instead of RPG’s %SCAN function, I use SQL’s LOCATE and UPPER functions, like this:

  dcl-s  Description  char(48);
  dcl-s  pos          int (10);
  
  exec sql
     set :pos = locate ('HAMMER', upper(:Description));
  

  If Description has the …

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• Guru Classic: Looking For Commitment, Part 1

  June 19, 2019 Paul Tuohy

  Author’s Note: This set of three articles was originally published in March of 2009. (See links in Related Stories below). As companies look to modernizing their applications, commitment control can play an integral role. In my next three Guru Classic articles, I will be updating the content of these articles for free-form RPG.

  In this article, I will discuss what commitment control is, why you may want to use it, and the basic requirements for commitment control. In subsequent articles, I will look more closely at how commitment control works, different ways in which it can be implemented, …

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• Guru Classic: Giving RDi a Split Personality

  June 19, 2019 Susan Gantner

  A commonly asked question by RDi newbies is: “How do I view source in split screen like I can in SEU?” The answer is that you can’t do it exactly like SEU, but then why would you want to? The RDi editor offers far greater flexibility.

  The original version of my tip on this subject was published back in 2007. Back then, the toolset we know as RDi was called “WDSC”. Quite a lot of other changes have occurred within RDi as well. Originally, a specialized perspective was required to make this feature work well. Today’s RDi works well without …

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• Guru Classic: Where Does Data Live? The New Basics

  June 19, 2019 Jon Paris

  Every time I teach some of the more recent additions to RPG, such as XML parsing or Open Access, I find that I need to include some “remedial” education on some of the data definition enhancements that have been made to the language over recent releases.

  Most of these enhancements came into the language many years ago back in the days when D-specs were de rigueur, but if you had no immediate need for them, they may have passed you by. After all, even the most avid reader of this newsletter has probably forgotten most of what they read here …

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• Bucking the System: Higher Ed, Hold the College

  June 12, 2019 Alex Woodie

  Jim Buck spent 15 years teaching IBM i and RPG at Gateway Technical College in Kenosha, Wisconsin. Buck achieved great things there, finding hundreds of students good jobs around the country. But ultimately the college experience grew old for Buck, so he ventured out on his own. That’s when he founded his own online IBM i educational company, imPower Technologies.

  That was two years ago, in the spring of 2017. After spending almost a year getting imPower Technologies up and running, Buck is teaching students IBM i and RPG once again. Currently he offers two courses: an introduction to IBM …

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