• Thoroughly Modern: IBM i Web Development Trends To Watch In the Second Half

  May 10, 2021 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  It is hard to believe, but in terms of budgets and thinking, within six weeks we will be entering the second half of 2021, a turning point year if there ever was one, and perhaps an inflection point for 2021 itself and thus for the next decade or so.

  The need to modernize is not lost on most IBM i shops, but it seems like there’s a new web technology to learn each week. It’s no surprise that getting started with Web development is a stumbling block in itself. That’s why vendors like Fresche are working to demystify Web development …

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• Thoroughly Modern: Innovative And Realistic Approaches To IBM i Modernization

  April 12, 2021 Chris Koppe

  In your organization, is IT considered a partner in the business or just the service department? Are your IT staff seen as innovators who are connected to your industry and the growth vision of the company? For a lot of clients that I work with on strategy, these are not ways that they would describe their IT departments. But they should be.

  At one point, IT was the enabler of innovation, helping drive automation and optimization of business processes. Now, most IT departments are maintaining more than they’re innovating, and there’s an opportunity to change that.

  Over the years I’ve …

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• Thoroughly Modern: Running CA 2E Applications? It’s Time To Modernize The UI

  March 8, 2021 Nick Hampson and Scott Gingerysty

  While CA 2E, formerly known as Synon, isn’t discussed as frequently in the IBM i space as RPG or COBOL, customers tell us that it provides tremendous value and competitive differentiation for their organization. In many cases, these applications have been reliably running mission-critical business applications for decades.

  However, Synon also comes with risks, such as a shrinking pool of Synon resources. Classically trained Synon programmers are scarce and most programmers who are working with Synon today have picked it up from someone else. Sure, they can build a business application, but when they go outside the basics of the …

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• Thoroughly Modern: Understanding Your IBM i Web Application Needs With Application Discovery

  February 8, 2021 Scott Gingerysty and Derek Woods

  Considering web and mobile development on IBM i? Before you start coding, it’s helpful to assess and validate your vision with a Discovery. Adding this step to your development process increases the likelihood that your project will succeed because it gives stakeholders a clear understanding of what you need, how the application will solve users’ problems and what it will cost.

  Fresche’s Web Application Development team is frequently called upon to consider a new business application and estimate how much it will cost to build it. With the amount of detail we typically have at this point (to wit: almost …

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• 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 …

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• Thoroughly Modern: What’s New With PHP On IBM i?

  December 7, 2020 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  If you use PHP on IBM i, you’ve likely seen some recent announcements about some great changes coming to the open-source language. According to the latest blog post from Zend on PHP 8, there are a number of new functions being introduced including str_contains, str_starts_with, and str_ends_with, preg_last_error_msg and get_debug_type. In addition, the core PHP 8 engine has many new features, optimizations and improvements in the type system, error handling, and consistency. The key areas include:

  • JIT Compiler
  • Fatal errors on incompatible method signatures
  • LSP Enforcement
  • Resource “Classes”
  • Assertion behavior
  • XML-RPC is now in PECL
  • Reflection changes

  This is …

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• Thoroughly Modern: A Wealth Of Funding Options Makes It Easier To Take On Modernization

  November 9, 2020 Jeff Lovette

  Investment in IT is being driven by a new conversation – the value-aligned technology stack. The pandemic/recession is triggering the need for coordinated, business-led technology strategies that bring costs under control and harvest more value from technology to transform the business. Even before the events of 2020 began to play out, it wasn’t always easy to get funding for key IT initiatives, and now, as the world tries to come to grips with our new reality, it may seem even tougher. But it doesn’t have to be that way.

  From a business sense, three key notions stand out from our …

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• Thoroughly Modern: Speed Up Application Development With Automated Testing

  October 12, 2020 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Starting with the System/38 and even more so with the AS/400 and its progeny, the hallmark of the system, at least according to IBM, was its ease of use. This is not exactly the right idea. While the integrated nature of the platform means it is easy to deploy, and the self-management nature of tech support, database administration, and even system administration yields an ease of management, and the tight coupling of the relational database management system with the high-level compilers has definitely yielded an ease of programming.

  It is that last bit that is the hallmark …

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• Thoroughly Modern: The Smart Approach to Modernization – Know Before You Go!

  September 14, 2020 Daniel Crépeau

  In today’s rapidly changing digital economy, the ability to keep up, compete and quickly adapt is critical. Every industry, from transportation and logistics to banking, retail, insurance and even manufacturing, is facing business challenges that are forcing them to think about how they can manage change and be ready when disruption occurs.

  Like many others, your organization probably had to evaluate how your systems could adapt to the changes that occurred over the past several months. Here’s an example that you might have seen in your own neighborhood: Restaurant #1 has been developing the ability for customers to place orders …

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• Thoroughly Modern: Strategic Things to Consider With APIs and IBM i

  August 10, 2020 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  The great thing about application programming interfaces is that many of the ways that programmers need to interact with system and application software are predefined and allow for consistent access to features and functions as well as data. To a certain extent, the APIs are what make such software useful. The API describes how the interface works, and libraries (in the sense of the software market at large, not the OS/400 and IBM i definition of that word) are developed to implement the functionality of the interface.

  The fun bit is that not only system software makers like IBM get …

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