• Open Source The Path To Software Riches For IBM i

  December 2, 2020 Alex Woodie

  For what is supposed to be a proprietary platform, the IBM i server sure has a lot of open source software running on it. In recent months, it appears that the majority of new programs introduced to IBM i are open source in nature. That pattern shows no signs of changing any time soon, according to a recent report by OpenLogic.

  Open software has existed on the IBM i platform for many years. The first highly publicized dip into the open source well occurred in 2005, when IBM partnered with a company called Zend to bring its PHP runtime to …

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• An Update On Java for IBM i

  September 23, 2020 Alex Woodie

  Java is alive and well on IBM i, but it’s in a state of change at the moment, thanks to changes Oracle made to how it licenses and develops the popular technology. Meanwhile, IBM is getting ready to exploit upcoming Power10 capabilities with its server runtime for Java.

  In late June, IBM quietly released an early access version of Java 11 through its RPM process. The release, which IBM i shops can access via yum or through ACS, is not production ready, and is only intended for testing purposes.

  “We have, however, done thorough functional testing of various workloads, including …

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• More Open Source Databases Coming To IBM i

  June 15, 2020 Alex Woodie

  IBM is in the process of bringing several new open source databases to the IBM i platform, including schema-less NoSQL databases as well traditional relational systems. Among the databases that Rochester is targeting are MongoDB, arguably the most popular NoSQL database and a favorite among Web and mobile developers, as well as PostgreSQL, one of the industry’s oldest and most widely used relational databases.

  Databases today almost are like programming languages, with developers mixing and matching databases to handle different functions, often within the same application. DB-Engines.com tracks more than 330 distinct databases, while there are somewhere around 700 programming …

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• Seiden Group Offers PHP Migration Service

  May 27, 2020 Alex Woodie

  Change is in the air when it comes to PHP on IBM i. The free Zend distribution of PHP that has been adopted by thousands of IBM i shops over the years is going away, and it’s being replaced by a new community distribution that’s installed via RPM. But how can you move existing PHP apps to the new environment? Seiden Group has a potential solution.

  As we told you last week, the Zend Server Basic environment will stop being offered by Perforce (the company that now owns Zend Technology) or distributed with the IBM i operating system on …

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• The End is Near for Zend Server Basic PHP

  May 20, 2020 Alex Woodie

  Zend Server Basic, the free PHP runtime used by thousands of IBM i shops, will cease being offered starting in July 2021. That’s the word from Perforce, the company that now owns Zend and its lineup of PHP tools and technologies. The replacement, of course, is the new community edition of PHP that became available via RPM in late 2019.

  Starting in 2006, Zend Technology began to develop a special version of its PHP runtime for IBM i, which was then called i5/OS. This offering, dubbed Zend Core for i5/OS, provided a familiar way for users of the iSeries server …

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• What’s New In Open Source With The Latest TRs

  April 27, 2020 Alex Woodie

  New technology is exciting. And when it can help you run your business more profitably or efficiently, well, it becomes very exciting. With IBM i, the open source community is arguably the biggest contributor of new technology to the platform. IT Jungle recently checked in Jesse Gorzinski, the IBM i open source architect, to hear how the open source story has improved with the recent technology refreshes.

  Arguably the biggest open source-related enhancement with IBM i 7.4 TR2 and 7.3 TR8 revolves around a change in RPM, the new delivery method that IBM adopted two years ago to distribute new …

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• Get Your PHP on IBM i, Hold the Zend

  December 11, 2019 Alex Woodie

  PHP was one of the first open source technologies to make an impact on the IBM i server. But due to the arrangement that IBM made with Zend, the PHP technology has been tied to a specific software distribution controlled by Zend. But now, IBM i shops that want to use PHP but don’t want to pay for the Zend Server distribution after the first free year of support is up now have a free option available – and it’s from the Zend folks themselves, no less.

  On December 2, the folks at Zend posted a repository for Community PHP …

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• IBM i 7.3 And 7.4 Get Their Autumn Tech Refreshes

  October 9, 2019 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Big Blue is hosting its IBM Systems Technical University this week, and used the occasion to quietly launch the Technology Refreshes, or TRs as they are known, for IBM i releases 7.3 and 7.4. If you were running around the Venetian Hotel, you could probably stitch together the extent of the updates to the platform, and to be honest, we are still trying to get all of the details, which were not available as we went to press.

  We will tell you what we know now, and then circle back and drill down into the details as appropriate.

  First of …

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• What’s New With IBM i Customer Support

  September 25, 2019 Alex Woodie

  IBM is making big changes to its support program that will have a major impact on how IBM i customers interact with Big Blue, for both software and hardware support. Two weeks ago it announced that IBM i customers would be switched over from the old IBM Service Request tool to the new IBM My Support site. IBM is also expanding support for open source software on IBM i.

  IBM has been testing the new IBM Support site, www.ibm.com/mysupport, for over a year for various customer groups and geographies. On September 14, the company announced that it was cutting …

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• R Comes To i

  May 1, 2019 Alex Woodie

  IBM is now officially supporting the language R with its IBM i operating system, the company announced last week. The open source language, which has long been a favorite of data scientists, statisticians, and others involved with scientific computing, gives IBM i an immediate boost when it comes to data mining and machine learning.

  The R language was originally developed 25 years ago by a pair of computer science professors, Ross Ihaka and Robert Gentleman, at the University of Auckland, New Zealand. The software, which was developed largely in C and Fortran, was based largely on S, a programming language …

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