• 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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• Red Hat’s Ansible Automation Comes To IBM i

  August 3, 2020 Alex Woodie

  Big Blue is now supporting IBM i with Ansible, the open source configuration management software developed by Red Hat. By including IBM i and AIX as a supported target in Ansible, companies that run IBM i will be able to remotely configure and manage IBM i and AIX servers using the same Ansible tools and techniques that they use to manage mainstream X86 and cloud server environments.

  Ansible was created back in 2012 by Michael DeHaan, the author of the Cobbler provisioning server and co-author of the Fedora Unified Network Controller (Func) framework for remote administration. It’s been widely adopted …

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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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• How GraphQL Can Improve IBM i APIs

  March 9, 2020 Alex Woodie

  IBM i shops are embracing APIs as a method for accessing data and programs, just like the wider IT world. As RESTful Web services overtook SOAP-based ones in popularity, IBM i shops moved with them. Now a new approach to Web services, dubbed GraphQL, is gaining traction in the wider IT world, and leading IBM i developers are right there again.

  GraphQL, if you’re not familiar, is a relatively new language and runtime for exposing and consuming APIs. The software, which was originally developed in 2015 by Facebook to streamline delivery of content in complex environments, essentially provides an abstraction …

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• Digging Into the Latest IBM i TRs

  October 23, 2019 Alex Woodie

  The fall batch of Technology Refreshes (TRs) have been revealed, and as expected, there’s a bit of new functionality available for customers who use IBM i 7.3 and 7.4. In this story, we’ll tackle enhancements in open source, systems management and monitoring, and development, which means we’ll dive deeper into other areas, like database and HA/DR, in a future story.

  Let’s start with the fun stuff: open source. With IBM i 7.3 TR7 and 7.4 TR1, IBM has brought support for two prominent open source projects, including ZeroMQ and Redis.

  ZeroMQ is a universal messaging library that allows users to …

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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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• What Is Happening With RFEs For IBM i?

  October 29, 2018 Alex Woodie

  IBM customers have been encouraged to vote on product enhancements for over a year as part of the Request for Enhancement (RFE) process, and a number of new features have actually made it into IBM i technology refreshes (TRs). What new or improved IBM i functionality will Big Blue work on next?

  It’s hard to say exactly which RFE items will strike a chord with IBM product managers, since the requests can be all over the board and impact a range of components, from the IBM i OS itself and the Db2 for i database to Access Client Solutions (ACS) …

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• Kubernetes Container Control Comes To Power Systems

  October 29, 2018 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  The moment that Google created a clone of parts of its internal Borg cluster and container management system and open sourced it as the Kubernetes project, the jig was pretty much up.

  Google had done a lot of the fundamental work to bring containers to the Linux platform starting way back in 2005, and had shared its techniques with the open source community, leading directly to the Docker container format and the engine that runs it atop the Linux kernel. While Docker, the company, got a jump start with its Docker Swarm container orchestrator and then its fuller Docker Enterprise …

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• Trinity Guard Fills Gap In IBM i Network Security

  December 11, 2017 Alex Woodie

  Trinity Guard, the IBM i security software company founded by the original developers from Pentasafe, this month rolled out TG Secure, a new network security product that addresses a potentially serious gap in exit point coverage that many IBM i shops who use open source software may not be aware of.

  IBM has done a good job of bringing new open source tools, technologies, and applications to the platform. The addition of languages like PHP, Node.js, Ruby, and Python; products like the NGINX Web server, the MySQL/MariaDB databases, and the Git repository; and everything else included in the 5733-OPS open …

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• TRs for IBM i 7.3 and 7.2: Enhancements, No Big Surprises

  October 4, 2017 Dan Burger

  With each Technology Refresh, we are reminded that the pace of enhancements IBM brings to its IBM i operating system and related software products is significant and that certain areas are more significant than others. So, the IBM i community is either aligned with these upgrades and eager to put them to use or it’s not yet ready, willing or able to be technologically current. As usual, there are IBM i shops watching as the enhancements unfold and making decisions on whether the enhancements can deliver benefits to their business in terms of productivity and solving business challenges.

  Steve Will, …

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