• Guru: Creating A Web Service With Basic Authentication

  August 12, 2024 Mike Larsen

  I have been working with web services for many years, and I usually use IBM’s IWS (Integrated Web Service) tool to create them. The tool provides a wizard-based interface that allows me to quickly create a web service from an RPG program. Recently, I created a web service that uses basic authentication, and I want to share my experience.

  I am assuming that you are already familiar with creating a web server and a web service, so I am just going to show the steps that need to be taken to add basic authentication functionality. If you would like me …

  Read more

• Kisco Names Two IBM i Fellowship Winners, Expands Program

  August 7, 2024 Alex Woodie

  Kisco Systems last month unveiled the next batch of recipients for its unique IBM i fellowship program. The individuals, who hail from Oklahoma and Georgia, will receive IBM i training from imPower Technologies and attend COMMON conferences in Florida and California at Kisco’s expense. The company also announced that it will expand the fellowship to three recipients next year.

  Justin Loeber, who purchased Kisco Systems from his father Richard in 2021, started the Richard C. Loeber Fellowship for Careers in IBM i last year as a way to incentivize the development of IBM i skills outside of the university setting. …

  Read more

• Open Source IBM i Build Tool Now Supports VS Code

  July 24, 2024 Alex Woodie

  A new release of the open source iBuild tool now supports VS Code, the developer of the tool recently announced. The new release also now fully supports ILE, which is critical to the future of the IBM i platform, the iBuild creator says.

  iBuild is a free build tool that automates the task of running all of a developer’s RPG source code through the IBM compilers. It’s been in active development for about eight years and can be downloaded from sourceforge.net/projects/ibuild.

  What makes iBuild unique is that it puts instructions on how to build objects into the header of …

  Read more

• Guru: Web Concepts For The RPG Developer, Part 3

  July 22, 2024 Chris Ringer

  Greetings everyone. Articles part one and two were both an introduction on how to build components in an HTTP request. In part three, we will begin to connect the dots and discuss how to asymmetrically sign a simple string. If you ever need to send a secure HTTP request to a government agency or financial institution, you likely will authenticate with a signed token. So, here we go!

  Base64 Take Two

  In part one, the SQL scalar function BASE64_ENCODE embedded in RPG converted a string to base64. This technique will cover most use cases, but what if you need …

  Read more

• How To Contribute To IBM’s GenAI Code Assistant For RPG

  July 15, 2024 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Back in October 2023, IBM launched its “Project Hopper” Watsonx Code Assistant for Z, which as the name suggests is a programming assistant that will eventually be built into the open source VS Code integrated development environment that was created by Microsoft and that is being explicitly trained to help programmers take applications coded in COBOL and convert them to Java. We speculated back then about how LLMs and GenAI might be used to do similar – and different – things for the IBM i platform, and back in May at the POWERUp 2024 conference Steve Will, the chief …

  Read more

• IBM Begins the Purge of Old Greenscreen Utilities

  July 10, 2024 Alex Woodie

  IBM is prepping the IBM i community to prepare to adapt to some substantial changes that are coming with the next release of IBM i, including the end of support for a large swath of the Application Development ToolSet (ADTS) that ships with Rational Development Studio (RDS). Source Entry Utility (SEU) and Programming Development Manager (PDM) are not among the ADTS tools getting the boot, but that’s not stopping midrange professionals from speculating that their time in IBM i is limited, too.

  As part of its May 7 Technology Refresh for IBM i 7.4 and 7.5, IBM issued a “software …

  Read more

• Where Do RPG Programmers Come From? And Other IBM i Questions

  July 10, 2024 Alex Woodie

  The IBM i community has faced a skills crunch off and on for the past decade or longer, as Baby Boomers retire and IBM i shops struggle to find replacements. One big reason for the hiring gap is that the old ways of finding new RPG programmers and other IBM i professionals no longer work like they used to, according to IBM i educator Jim Buck.

  “What they did for years was they just stole from the guys down the road,” said Buck, who is the president and CEO of IBM i training company imPower Technologies. ‘“I’ll go to …

  Read more

• Big Blue Working On Replacement For Global Solutions Directory For IBM i

  July 8, 2024 Alex Woodie

  IBM is developing a website to replace the Global Solutions Directory, which it recently killed off. The new site should allow customers to search through a comprehensive list of IBM i applications serving specific industries, just like they could with the Global Solutions Directory.

  For years, IBM’s Global Solutions Directory served as the go-to mechanism for researching the wide breadth of IBM i software products available around the world. If you needed to know what kind of banking solutions existed on IBM i version 6.1 for midsized American credit unions, or what the market looked like for Indonesian construction equipment …

  Read more

• Thoroughly Modern: The Synon Transformation Journey, From Legacy To Modern Java Solutions

  July 8, 2024 Chris Koppe

  In today’s evolving tech landscape, companies that run CA 2E (Synon) on IBM i face significant challenges hindering progress and sustainability. Synon represents a fraction of the market share in IBM i environments, far behind RPG and COBOL, and IBM’s recent announcement to cease PL/I support in future OS versions will impact compliance for SOX-regulated and other industries.

  Moreover, shifts in ownership – from Computer Associates to Broadcom – cast doubt on Synon’s long-term viability and continued support. A dwindling pool of Synon developers, brittle applications that are difficult to integrate with modern technologies, and cryptic database structures further add …

  Read more

• Guru: Parsing JSON That Has Spaces In The Key

  July 8, 2024 Mike Larsen

  One of my favorite tasks is working with APIs. I’ve worked with many APIs over the years, and some introduce unique challenges that must be overcome. Recently, I worked on a project where I was to consume a REST API that provided a JSON payload. While that seems straight forward, I quickly discovered a challenge.

  The JSON payload had keys that have spaces in them (Figure 1). That may be considered bad practice, but I still needed to figure out how I could parse it correctly. Having never seen JSON like this before, I started with a Google search. I …

  Read more

Previous Articles Next Articles