• iTech Solutions Keeps You In The Know With VERIFi

  February 22, 2021 Alex Woodie

  “An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.” That time-tested bit of advice from Ben Franklin has many applications, including, it turns out, IBM i systems management. And through its new VERIFi offering, iTech Solutions is set to provide many ounces of prevention by keeping customers on top of what is happening with their IBM i servers.

  iTech Solutions’ VERIFi comes in three flavors. With VERIFi Weekly Status Reporting, the company remotely monitors key aspects of IBM i server health and summarize those findings in a PDF sent once a week for $295 per year. It offers …

  Read more

• A Conversation With Carol Woodbury on IBM i Security

  February 15, 2021 Dawn Winston

  (Sponsored Content) Carol Woodbury has been a one of the most active and respected voices on IBM i security for decades. She is also an award-winning and internationally recognized speaker and writer on IBM i security. She has authored several books addressing IBM i security and is the only author with commercially available books dedicated to the topic.

  Currently, Carol Woodbury is the president, chief technology officer and co-founder of DXR Security. Precisely’s product marketing director, Dawn Winston, had a virtual Q&A session where she had a chance to discuss Woodbury’s insights on the current state of IBM …

  Read more

• Guru: A Philosophically Engineered Approach to the Processing of Parameters, Take Two

  February 1, 2021 Ted Holt

  A strange thing happened to me recently. I was writing a new program and like a good programmer, was not reinventing the wheel. I was calling a utility program that calculated the values I needed. However, this utility program, which had always worked correctly, was giving me invalid data. How is it possible that a program can work properly for a long time and suddenly go bad?

  The answer to this question was ably answered by Rick Cook, who wrote “Programming today is a race between software engineers striving to build bigger and better idiot-proof programs, and the Universe trying …

  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

• Thoroughly Modern: DevOps Refactoring Of RPG Applications with RDi

  January 11, 2021 Ray Everhart

  Regardless of your current situation – namely, the size and age of your codebase – there is great value to be gained from refactoring. In this article, I will explain what refactoring is, provide the business justification, and describe some refactoring best practices.

  So what is refactoring? In the strictest sense of the word, refactoring is when you improve the quality of code without changing what it does. Refactoring is not about enhancements or bug fixes, but code quality and making the code more efficient and maintainable. Code refactoring also improves readability, which makes QA and debugging go much more …

  Read more

• Guru: SQL and QTEMP

  January 4, 2021 Ted Holt

  Hey, Ted.

  For many years IBM i developers, operators, and others have taken advantage of an operating system feature called the QTEMP library. Through the years you have referenced it various times in IT Jungle as a useful feature of IBM i. I recently read an article in which a respected IBM expert from the Rochester lab services team told people not to use the QTEMP library when working in SQL. It would be very interesting if you could dive into this topic and explain when/if there is still a time and place for QTEMP. I think a lot of …

  Read more

• X Marks The Spot For CYBRA’s Forms Software

  December 14, 2020 Alex Woodie

  When it comes to creating forms and labels on the IBM i server, CYBRA’s MarkMagic is one of the most frequently used products in the market, and is used by the biggest companies in consumer goods and retail. With the latest release of MarkMagic X, the company is finding new and creative ways to get additional functionality into the hands of its users.

  MarkMagic X, which is also called version 10, introduces a host of new features that have been requested by CYBRA’s sizable installed base. With over 30 years in business, CYBRA has amassed 2,700 customers, including nine …

  Read more

• The Ultimate Set Of Tools

  December 14, 2020 Rob McNelly

  Those of a certain age will certainly remember the moment in Fast Times At Ridgemont High when Jeff Spicoli got himself into a bind after he wrecked his friend’s car. Luckily, Spicoli’s dad was a TV repairman, and he had an ultimate set of tools. Spicoli knew that with those tools, he could fix it. That level of confidence is intoxicating, although in this case it was possibly misplaced.

  I have a friend that lives around the corner from me that actually does have the ultimate set of tools, and knows how to use them. For example, he recently rebuilt …

  Read more

Previous Articles