RPG Archives - Page 8 of 56

Youthful IBM i Optimism In Fort Worth

June 3, 2024 Alex Woodie

The IBM i community showed up in force last month for COMMON’s annual conference. And they sure didn’t drive or fly to Fort Worth for the weather, which was hot and muggy. The POWERUp 2024 attendees – all 1,100 of them – came to the show to learn about the platform, which may be in the early stages of – dare we say it? – a youth moment.

First things first: the attendance number. COMMON was shooting for about 1,000, which is about where its annual spring conference has been for the better part of a decade (the fall conferences …
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ARCAD Breaks Up Monolithic Code With New Transformer Tool

June 3, 2024 Alex Woodie

There are many different aspects to application modernization: moving from 5250 greenscreens to Web interfaces, adopting the SQL database engine, and using DevOps techniques. Another part of modernization is breaking up monolithic codebases into smaller, more manageable chunks that can be more readily integrated using APIs and Web services, and that’s the goal of a new version of its Transformer product line launched recently by ARCAD Software.

ARCAD Software already offers several capabilities under its Transformer brand, including Transformer RPG for converting fixed-format RPG to free-format RPG; Transformer DB for converting DDS files to modern DDL tables; Transformer Field for …
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Guru: With Procedure Driven RPG, Be Precise With Options(*Exact)

June 3, 2024 Gregory Simmons

Introduced to the RPG language in V7R2 TR1 and V7R3 TR7, the Options(*Exact) enables RPG programmers to adopt a more defensive coding style. Defensive coding is something all developers should be practicing.

DISCLAIMER: The edibility of the mushrooms listed in my test program are purely to give the program a little context and make it interesting. Their edible status is from the publication by the Missouri Department of Conservation called A Guide to Missouri’s Edible and Poisonous Mushrooms. Before foraging for and/or consuming any wild mushroom, do your research and be safe.
```
**Free
Ctl-Opt Main(Test_Exact_Options);
Ctl-Opt Debug Option(*SrcStmt:*NoDebugIO);
```
…
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IBM Developing AI Coding Assistant for IBM i

May 22, 2024 Alex Woodie

During his keynote presentation at the POWERUp 2024 conference Monday, IBM i CTO Steve Will announced that IBM is actively exploring ways to incorporate generative AI into the IBM i platform. The most promising of three individual but related projects is a plan to build a large language model (LLM)-powered coding assistant for IBM i that will initially provide three functions to support RPG development, with more expected in the future.

The genesis of the coding assisting project for RPG, which doesn’t have a name yet, can be traced to last year’s launch of watsonx Code Assistant for Z, which …
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Guru: Testing URLs With HTTP_GET_VERBOSE

May 20, 2024 Gregory Simmons

In my previous article Fooling around with SQL and RPG, I explored having a little fun with the HTTP_GET function to fetch a witty Dad Joke from https://icanhazdadjoke.com/. In this article, I want to demonstrate a more practical use of this great function. Or should I say, another version of HTTP_GET, that is HTTP_GET_VERBOSE, which also was introduced to us by the DB2 team in V7R3.

In its simplest implementation, I can insert the URL I want to test into an SQL statement:
```
select *
from table(QSYS2.HTTP_GET_VERBOSE('https://icanhazdadjoke.com/',''))
```
I will later want to run this embedded in an RPG …
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Guru: The OpenAI API – The Easy Way

May 13, 2024 Dan Darnell

When it comes to programming in a particular programming language there is what you can do and what you can do easily. I use RPG every day and have done so since the System/34 days. I love the language but I’ve also picked up other programming languages over time because sometimes RPG isn’t the right tool for the job.

I’ve been using IBM EGL – Enterprise Generation Language – to create IBM i applications since 2009. IBM made a push at one time to entice RPG programmers to pick up the language and toolset (Rational Business Developer) for modernization …
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Spring 2024 IBM i Technology Refresh Unveiled by IBM

May 8, 2024 Alex Woodie

IBM today took the wraps off the latest Technology Refresh for the IBM i platform. When IBM i 7.5 TR4 and 7.4 TR10 ship on June 14, customers will find enhancements such as Merlin version 2, new features in Navigator and ACS, security improvements, a couple of RPG enhancements, HA and DR enhancements, and a host of new SQL-based database services, among other capabilities.

In addition to new features, which we’ll get to in a second, the launch of IBM i 7.5 TR4 and 7.4 TR10 is important for an unexpected reason: It will mark the beginning of IBM’s transition …
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What Degree? Kisco’s RCL Fellowship Spotlights Value of Training, Hard Work

April 22, 2024 Alex Woodie

Having a college degree is certainly one path to having a career in IT. But it’s not the only one, a point that Kisco Systems president Justin Loeber is making with the latest round of the Richard C. Loeber Fellowship, which is now accepting applications.

It’s not that Justin Loeber is adamantly opposed to college degrees. After all, the current Kisco Systems owner eventually received a diploma in environmental science and public policy, which he called “a passion play.”

But his father, Rich Loeber, never got a college degree. Despite proving his worth in data processing at a railroad and …
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Guru: Web Concepts For The RPG Developer, Part 1

April 22, 2024 Chris Ringer

Way back in the 1990s, I recall accessing data with only RPG III F-Specs. But nowadays some of that critical data may live in the cloud. The good news is tools like HTTPAPI and RXS and SQL functions like SQL HTTP are available to access that remote data from the IBM i. But what you may not know is how to actually format components in those HTTP requests.

Here I will discuss some techniques to build those components in an HTTP request before sending it across the web.

HTTP Get Versus Post

The two most common methods for an HTTP …
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Guru: Fooling Around With SQL And RPG

April 15, 2024 Gregory Simmons

Editor’s Note: This was originally scheduled to be published on April 1. No joke. And for a lot of complex reasons, that could not happen. But, it’s still fun, so enjoy.

I started out one morning, purely interested in having a bit of fun. Honest. In RSS within ACS, I often like to run this SQL:
```
 select *
 from json_table(
      QSYS2.HTTP_GET('https://icanhazdadjoke.com/',
              '{"header": "Accept,application/json", "sslTolerate":"true"}'),
              'lax $' columns ("joke" varchar(200) CCSID 1208)
      )
```
Okay, that was fun. This is harmless, good fun. But then I thought, what if I put this into a simple RPG program? Then I …
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