• 2021: An IBM i Year in Review, Part One

  December 13, 2021 Alex Woodie

  It’s mid-December. and since nothing much else is going on, let’s take a quick waltz through the IT Jungle archives to see what kind of year it was. It all started back in January, when…

  Our esteemed founding editor tried to convince IBM what is plainly obvious: That the IBM i installed base is “still its very largest enterprise computing customer base” (emphasis added). Yes, there are more Red Hat licenses, but when it comes to unique companies, IBM i, with around 120,000 customers around the world, is still tops. Will IBM do the hard work to find a (virtualized) …

  Read more

• IBM i Developer Day This Week

  November 10, 2021 Alex Woodie

  IBM i developers of all stripes are welcome to IBM i Developer Day, a free virtual event that’s scheduled to take place next Friday, November 19, at 1 p.m. ET. Organized by Liam Allan, the event will feature a heavy dose of Visual Studio Code (Allan’s favorite IDE) plus discussions hosted by IBMers on the future of IBM i and its role in the cloud.

  The world of application development is moving fast, but many IBM i pros are still stuck in the past when it comes to the tools, technologies, and techniques they use. While RPG and COBOL development …

  Read more

• End of Life Looms for PHP 7.3

  October 13, 2021 Alex Woodie

  Organizations that are running PHP version 7.3 have just over a month to upgrade to a newer version and avoid losing bug fixes and security fixes when 7.3 hits the end of life (EOL) on December 6. The good news is that PHP version 7.4 and 8.0 are stable and will be supported for some time. The not-so-good news is it appears a large number of IBM i shops are still running older releases of the PHP language.

  According to an informal poll conducted by Seiden Group last month, about half of the IBM i shops that participated in a …

  Read more

• PHP Decisions Loom as Original Distro Reaches End of Life

  May 24, 2021 Alex Woodie

  IBM i shops have five more weeks until Zend Server Basic, the PHP runtime used by thousands of IBM i shops over the years, reaches end of life and will no longer be offered, supported, or updated with security fixes. Customers that want to continue using PHP safely beyond July 1 will need to obtain a new license or move to a new PHP runtime.

  The long history of Zend Server Basic stretches all the way back to 2006, which was the year when the PHP runtime became one of the first open source technologies to be adapted to run …

  Read more

• COMMON Heads To Ohio With Hybrid NAViGATE Event

  May 24, 2021 Alex Woodie

  COMMON this week is welcoming members back to its first in-person event in over a year. The physical fun will commence in Columbus, Ohio, where it will hold its NAViGATE conference for both in-person and online attendees this Monday through Wednesday.

  More than 250 sessions will be presented by 100-plus IBM i experts during COMMON’s three-day show. Each session will take place live (as opposed to being pre-recorded, which became quite common during COVID-19) and will be available to folks who travelled to the Columbus venues as well as to people logging in over the Internet.

  The NAViGATE schedule …

  Read more

• What The Open Source Roadmap Holds For IBM i In 2021

  March 15, 2021 Alex Woodie

  2020 was whirlwind of a year when it comes to open source on IBM i, with many major new open source products coming to the platform. The roadmap for open source software in 2021 may not be quite as active as last year, but there will be some compelling new technology to play with, coming from IBM and the community, IBM’s open source guru Jesse Gorzinski tells us.

  “Last year was a pretty big year for open source,” says Gorzinski, whose official IBM title is senior business architect for open source software on IBM i. “In 2021, we’re going to …

  Read more

• 2021 Predictions for IBM i: Part Two

  January 20, 2021 Alex Woodie

  The response from the first batch of IBM i prediction we ran last week was superb. Here’s hoping that the community finds the second batch of predictions equally as worthwhile.

  Chris Wey, the president of the Power Business Unit at Rocket Software, wonders if crystal balls have any power left following the events of last year. “After an unpredictable 2020, the very notion of predictions is called into question,” Wey says. “Still, as an optimist, I believe we will see some incredibly positive outcomes of the past year’s turmoil in the coming year in our space.

  “First, Power systems …

  Read more

• 2021 Predictions for IBM i, Part 1

  January 13, 2021 Alex Woodie

  With an eventful 2020 thankfully in the rearview mirror, it’s time to start thinking about what 2021 might have in store for us. The IBM i community, like most of the world, could use a little bit of hope at the moment. We asked IBM i community leaders to deliver predictions, and they responded.

  Liam Allan, who is a consultant at Seiden Group and the creator of ILE Editor, has a couple of predictions for IT Jungle.

  “My focus is mainly software. I do still predict Node.js gaining traction on IBM i,” Allan writes. “The tooling is really …

  Read more

• Seiden Group Unveils A PHP Distro For IBM i

  January 11, 2021 Alex Woodie

  IBM i shops that are looking for PHP alternatives on IBM i may be interested to know that Seiden Group is now distributing and supporting its own PHP distribution. Called CommunityPlus+, the PHP runtime is distributed via RPM, includes a slew of components (including Db2 database connectors), and is available with technical support, if desired.

  Seiden Group’s free CommunityPlus+ distribution is a PHP runtime for software written in PHP versions 7.3 and 7.4, with support for PHP 8.0 coming soon. The software runs in the IBM i PASE environment in 64-bit mode, and includes a slew of database drivers, …

  Read more

• Seiden Group Helps Bring Community PHP To The Japanese Market

  October 5, 2020 Alex Woodie

  The new community edition of PHP is gaining interest from IBM i shops around the world. Now one of the biggest IBM i service providers in Japan, Chubu Systems Corp., is working with Seiden Group to ensure that Japanese IBM i shops have the latest, greatest distribution of PHP to work with.

  As you may have heard, there is a new open source PHP runtime for IBM i that is being distributed via RPM, which is IBM’s preferred method for sharing open source software on IBM i. The new community edition of PHP is free, and essentially replaces …

  Read more

Previous Articles