RPGLE Archives - IT Jungle

Is It Time To Rename RPG?

August 24, 2020 Alex Woodie

Should IBM rename RPG, and if so, what should the new name be? It’s an interesting idea, and one that was recently floated by a member of the IBM i community, who submitted an official request for enhancement (RFE) on the matter. The crux of the argument is that full free-format RPG is such a dramatic departure from fixed-format RPG that it deserves a new name. But will IBM, which owns the language, go along with the change?

Report Program Generator, or RPG, debuted way back in 1959, at the dawn of the computer age, as a way to replicate …
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i2Rest Offers Native API Alternative to IWS

August 19, 2020 Alex Woodie

IBM i shops that want to expose their RPG applications as industry standard Web services have a few options to choose from. One solution they should keep on their list is i2Rest, which is a native ILE application that exposes RPG using modern OAuth2 and OpenAPI standards.

We first came across Alexei Baranov’s work back in 2012, when he was involved in the port of the SVN client to IBM i while working at a Moscow, Russia-based consulting firm. Soon thereafter, Baranov started working on developing Web services tools for IBM i.

The first version of his new Web …
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Guru: More End Of Year Feedback

December 9, 2019 Ted Holt

You are busy. The people you serve need you to do more than one human being can do. You don’t have time to look for comments or updates to the articles we run in this august publication or any other. For this reason, I was pleased to publish some of your feedback in last week’s issue. This week I am pleased to share a bit more.

In response to Guru: MERGE, Chicken, and Eggs, John asked a good question and made a good point:

How is using this merge technique under commitment control any different than just doing the …
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ARCAD Unveils GUI Modernization Tool

September 25, 2019 Alex Woodie

ARCAD Software is getting deeper into the application modernization business with the launch of iNow, a new tool designed to help IBM i users create compelling graphical user interfaces (GUI) that run across Windows, Web, and mobile form factors. The new offering, which is based on Microsoft .NET and utilizes Remote Desktop Protocol (RDP) technology, is being sold as part of a new suite called ARCAD for IBM i Modernization.

IBM i shops have been adapting their applications to Windows interfaces for the better part of 30 years, to the Web for about 20 years, and to mobile interfaces for …
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Guru: RDi Code Coverage Without SEPs

August 12, 2019 Susan Gantner

My last Guru tip provided an introduction to RDi’s Code Coverage tool that you can use to determine how complete your tests are. In that tip I discussed how to run it using Service Entry Points (SEPs). In this follow-on tip, I’ll continue the exploration of this tool with some additional details plus introduce you to an alternative way to run a Code Coverage session.

Before going into the alternative approach to running Code Coverage, there are a few details I didn’t mention in the first tip.

I mentioned that Code Coverage uses the debug engine. What I didn’t mention …
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Guru: How Thorough Was Your Last Test? RDi Code Coverage Can Tell You

July 22, 2019 Susan Gantner

When you’ve made changes to one or more programs, you test all the changes – right? And, of course, you also test all the rest of the code just to make sure you didn’t break anything else. Did you do that with your last set of changes? Did you test ALL the code? Enabling you to answer that last question is what RDi’s Code Coverage facility is all about.

This is an introduction to Code Coverage — the basics of both why and how to use it. Before I go into how to run it, it may pique your interest …
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IBM i Gets a New Crop of ‘Fresh Faces’

June 12, 2019 Alex Woodie

The IBM i platform isn’t getting any younger, and neither are the thousands of individuals who work on it. But that doesn’t mean that platform as a whole should be marked by gray. To celebrate the viability of the platform’s ability to attract young people, IBM System Magazine just introduced its newest crop of “Fresh Faces.”

IBM System Magazine has been calling attention to the IBM i youth movement since 2016, when it debuted its original crop of Fresh Faces. Liam Allan was a member of that group as a teenager, and he has since gone on to build himself …
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More IBM i Predictions For 2019

February 6, 2019 Alex Woodie

We kicked off our 2019 soothsaying last week with predictions from IBM i leaders on what the New Year will bring. We keep the ball rolling this week with another batch of predictions from our friends around the IBM i community.

According to Alison Butterill, IBM‘s the program director for offering management for IBM i, the platform will build off the momentum generated with last year’s 30th anniversary celebrant.

“The excitement begun in 2018 as we highlighted client innovation around the world will continue into 2019,” Butterill says. “The momentum continues to grow as clients are looking at ways …
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Lamps Plus Sheds Light On Modernization Integration

June 25, 2018 Dan Burger

Discussions about modernization continue to tie top management in knots. Questions about the time, the effort, and the risks to the business are difficult to answer with precision, so organizations habitually focus on obstacles rather than opportunities.

“If you stay in that mindset, you will never move,” says Derrick Lindsey, a modernization project lead at Lamps Plus, the nation’s largest specialty lighting retailer and a leading manufacturer of lighting and home furnishings. “There’s a lot less risk in modernizing existing applications on the IBM i than migrating off of the IBM i platform to other platforms such as Unix, Linux, …
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Rest4i Eyes Digital Transformation Via API

March 21, 2018 Alex Woodie

A new company headed by IBM i software veterans is beginning to turn some heads with a new product aimed at helping IBM i shops with digital transformation strategies. Rest4i, as the outfit is called, says its LXR framework turns IBM i into a lean, mean REST API-serving machine.

Stuart Milligan, who headed the UK software firm Databorough before it was sold to Fresche Legacy (now Fresche Solutions) way back in 2013, says LXR (pronounced “Lexer”) is the result of four years of investment and development in a “pure IBM i REST API solution.”

Milligan describes LXR as …
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