• The Top Ten IBM i Requests From The IBM Ideas Portal

  April 2, 2025 Alex Woodie

  Big Blue is gearing up for a major new release of the IBM i operating system. We don’t know yet what will be in the release, but we can forge some guesses by checking out what new features the IBM i community is requesting through the IBM Ideas portal, and how IBM reacts to them.

  IBM prides itself on being a customer-focused organization, and so it looks to the IBM i community for direction on what sort of features, capabilities, and fixes the IBM i community currently is looking for. That community outreach takes various forms, including the COMMON Americas …

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• IBM’s Fall 2024 Code for IBM i Enhancements

  November 13, 2024 Alex Woodie

  Adoption of Code for i continues to soar among IBM i developers, as they shift from heavy, expensive integrated development environments (IDEs) to lighter, open-source options. With the latest Technology Refreshes (TRs) for IBM i, IBM is making the VS Code plug-in even more useful for RPG and COBOL developers.

  Code for IBM i is the brainchild of Liam Allan, the midrange wunderkind with an intense aversion to Rational Developer for IBM i (RDi), IBM’s Java-based flagship IDE for IBM i. As adoption of the VS Code extension grew in the summer of 2022, IBM smartly hired Allan as a …

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• Guru: Procedure Driven RPG And Adopting The Pillars Of Object-Oriented Programming

  February 19, 2024 Gregory Simmons

  The four pillars of object-oriented programming (OOP): abstraction, encapsulation, inheritance, and polymorphism, were not created at a single point in time. They evolved gradually over several years, with contributions from various researchers and programmers. Here’s a brief overview of their evolution:

  1. Abstraction:

  • Alan Kay is credited with introducing the concept of abstraction in the 1960s with his work on Simula.
  • Abstraction gained further traction with the development of Smalltalk in the 1970s.

  2. Encapsulation:

  • David Parnas, in his 1972 paper “On the Criteria To Be Used in Decomposing Systems into Modules,” laid the groundwork for encapsulation by emphasizing the importance of

  …

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• RPG Training Program Spun Up by Trucking Industry Outsourcer

  February 7, 2024 Alex Woodie

  If you’re in the trucking business and need RPG programmers, you might want to check out the outsourcing firm DDC FPO, which has spun up a new program in the Philippines to train junior RPG programmers to work at American trucking firms.

  DDC FPO is one of the country’s largest business process outsourcing (BPO) firms serving the trucking industry. The company, which is headquartered in Evergreen, Colorado, works with more than half of the country’s less-than-truckload (LTL) operators. About one-third of the bills of lading generated daily are generated by DDC FPO workers, the company claims.

  The IBM i platform …

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• Guru: Procedure Driven RPG Means Keeping Your Variables Local

  November 6, 2023 Gregory Simmons

  One of the things I love most about procedure driven RPG is that it allows me to keep my variables locally defined. Imagine this horror story that happens all too often in RPG shops.

  Jake: “Hey Gregory, Accounting just called; seems the rebalancing report program is acting up. Didn’t I hear you were working on that the other day?”

  Me: “Ugh, yes. All I had to do was reset this field that was used to show or not show the totaling line between branches. I tested in my library and the fix worked fine.”

  Jake: “Yeah, I had to change …

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• IBM i Debugger Comes to VS Code

  February 15, 2023 Alex Woodie

  At long last, IBM i developers can now debug their code in a development environment other than Rational Developer for IBM i or Merlin. The news came last week, when Liam Allan announced that the ILE debugging feature is now available in Code for IBM i, his third-party, IBM i-centric plug-in for Visual Studio Code.

  “Debugging ILE COBOL and RPGLE inside @code like it’s any other day!” Allan tweeted from his @Notesofbarry Twitter account. “I’m pumped for this release #ibmi.”

  Indeed, this day has been a long time in coming. Allan, who has not been shy about sharing his dislike …

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• It Is Time To Take The 2022 State Of IBM i Survey

  March 21, 2022 Miranda VanHorn

  The market for IBM i platform – previously known as the AS/400, the iSeries, and the System i – has seen some remarkable changes over the last decade. New capabilities, including graphical user interfaces and support of open-source languages, have ensured that the platform is more than capable of supporting the needs of today’s businesses.

  The annual Profound Logic State of IBM i Modernization Survey looks at trends and attitudes that shape the IBM i modernization market. The data collected gives the entire community a better understanding of the current state of IBM i and the priorities of businesses with …

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• The Mod Squad Comes Together to Modernize Old RPG

  October 6, 2021 Alex Woodie

  In the early 70s, a group of fictional social misfits joined up to solve crimes on the hit television series The Mod Squad. Now a group of real-life IBM i professionals of the same name are uniting to solve an equally pressing problem: modernizing old RPG code, including some that dates back to the 1970s.

  “You’ve heard of IBM‘s upward compatibility,” says Rich Ollari, an IBM i veteran who is one of the ringleaders of the new Mod Squad. “Code that ran back in the 80s, even the 70s, is still running today, and that’s what we’re fighting with. …

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• New Extension Brings IBM i Closer to VS Code

  August 11, 2021 Alex Woodie

  When it comes to integrated development environments (IDEs), Microsoft is best known for its full-featured Visual Studio offering. But many developers have grown attached to its younger, free-er, and lighter weight cousin, Visual Studio Code (VS Code). And with the new VS Code for IBM i extension recently unveiled by Liam Allan, the skinny IDE’s integration with the midrange server is getting better.

  VS Code for IBM i is an open source extension that allows developers to work with IBM i languages like RPG, COBOL, and CL within VS Code. Allan first released the product in February, but largely kept …

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• Guru: Customizing RDi Beyond Preferences

  May 3, 2021 Susan Gantner

  In my last tip , I covered a few of the preferences that I like to change to customize the way I use RDi. But there are a number of other customizations I use that aren’t implemented via the Preferences dialogs. I’ll continue the customization topic in this tip by covering some of those other options.

  Compile-Related Customizations

  I’ll start out with a couple of things I like to change related to compiling code. This includes customizing and creating new compile commands and modifying my compile Error List.

  I like to modify some of the parameters for the “ordinary” compile …

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