• What the 2024 Marketplace Report Says About IBM i App Dev, Language Use

  March 13, 2024 Alex Woodie

  What languages, development environments, and tools are IBM i developers currently using to create new applications? How many users are still on SEU? And how are VS Code and Merlin faring among Web-based development tools? Fortra sought to answer those questions with its IBM i Marketplace Survey for 2024, and the results may surprise you.

  In late 2023, Fortra surveyed 270 IBM i professionals from around the world for the 2024 IBM i Marketplace Survey, which it published in January. You can download the report here.

  For the most part, Fortra asks the same questions every year, which is …

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• Guru: Getting Started With The Code 4 i Extension Within VS Code

  January 22, 2024 Gregory Simmons

  The Code for IBM i extension is growing in popularity and has certainly become my favorite source code editor. This article is not an attempt to convince you to drop RDi and switch to VS Code. Rather, I aim to share with you a few of my favorite settings and features in VS Code.

  Join In The Discussion

  Can’t figure out how to do something? Have a suggestion for a new enhancement? I am continually impressed with the speed at which I get responses when I post something. The team of coders and contributors to the Code for IBM i …

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• 2024 IBM i Predictions, Part Deux

  January 22, 2024 Alex Woodie

  How will 2024 unfold? Nobody knows the answer to that. But that’s not stopping members of the IBM i community from taking some swings. It’s not only a good Bayesian exercise to think through the probabilities of what may occur, but it’s often a bit of fun, too.

  Our second batch of 2024 predictions starts with IBM distinguished engineer Steve Will, who, as the IBM i chief technology officer and IBM i chief architect, doesn’t need to guess where the platform is going, since he’s literally leading the creation of it. Instead, his prediction focuses on the community.

  “2024 will …

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• RDi and RPG Enhancements in the 2023 Fall TRs

  October 25, 2023 Alex Woodie

  RPG developers will see some compelling new features coming out of the recent Technology Refresh (TR) announcement from IBM, including enhancements to the RDi development environment as well as new capabilities in the RPG language itself.

  RPG is nearly 65 years old, but like old dogs, the programming language can learn new tricks. The enhancements that IBM has brought to its venerable language with IBM i 7.5 TR3 and 7.4 TR9 continue a strong run of improvements, according to IBM i Product Manager Alison Butterill.

  “Every one of the TRs since we announced 7.5 has had at least some RPG …

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• Take A Progressive Approach To DevOps

  October 16, 2023 Jeff Tickner

  As Gene Amdahl, the chief architect of the IBM System/360 mainframe, correctly observed and what was subsequently codified as Amdahl’s Law, any kind of system that implements any kind of process is only as fast as its slowest component. What is true of bottlenecks in human processes is equally true in systems design and also in that overlapping area known as DevOps – the confluence of application development and system operations.

  If you can only be as fast as your slowest bottleneck, the converse is also true that you can speed up overall throughput of a workflow or a …

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• Fall 2023 IBM i Tech Refresh Brings Something For Everyone

  October 11, 2023 Alex Woodie

  As expected, IBM yesterday unveiled its fall Technology Refresh (TR) for IBM i, with updates starting to become available on November 17. IBM announced no new products as part of the fall 2023 TR cycle, but it did spread the love around by giving just about everybody something to cheer about in IBM i 7.5 TR3 and 7.4 TR9.

  Lots of different products that make up the IBM i environment will see some pretty meaningful enhancements with this release. If you spend a lot of time in Navigator for i or ACS, you will see new stuff. We haven’t had …

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• IBM Releases Db2 For i Extensions For VS Code

  October 9, 2023 Alex Woodie

  Interested in developing new ILE applications in VS Code that utilize the Db2 for i database? Then you’re in luck, because IBM recently created and released vscode-db2i, an open source database extension for Code for IBM i, the uber popular development environment that enables ILE programming in VS Code.

  It is tough to overstate the popularity of Code for IBM i, which Liam Allan created and released just over two years ago. The open source plug-in provides ILE functionality for Microsoft’s VS Code, enabling programmers to write and edit RPG, COBOL, C, and CL code in the lightweight, browser-based …

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• Rocket DevOps Now Supports VS Code

  September 25, 2023 Alex Woodie

  IBM i developers who prefer to code within VS Code can now get all the goodness of automated change management and CI/CD with Rocket Software’s DevOps offering, which now supports the popular browser-based development environment, among other new features.

  VS Code, which is short for Visual Studio Code, has rocketed to popularity in the IBM i community over the past couple of years. That popularity is due in large part to Code for IBM i, the Liam Allan-developed plug-in that brings ILE language support to Microsoft’s open source IDE.

  Allan, who is known to despise IBM’s full-fledged Java-based IDE, …

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• Merlin Subscriptions Picking Up, IBM and ARCAD Say

  September 13, 2023 Alex Woodie

  Hundreds of IBM i shops have adopted Merlin since it was released last year, according to IBM and ARCAD, which jointly developed the development and code management tool. The addition of a subscription offering in early 2023 significantly bolstered sales activity, the companies say.

  “In this last six months or so, we have really seen it tick up, which is exactly what we are expecting,” says IBM i Product Manager Alison Butterill, on the Merlin adoption curve.

  Sales were a bit slow coming out of the gate for Merlin, the novel, browser-based environment for application development and change management on …

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• Making Git Part of Your Modernization Strategy

  June 26, 2023 Daniel Magid

  Maybe the most important part of your IBM i modernization strategy should be modernizing the tools you are using to develop and maintain your applications. Most of the application development world has moved to tools centered around using Git for version control. There is no reason IBM i developers cannot do the same thing. IBM is solidly behind this strategy with their new Merlin product and most of the change management vendors have some kind of Git integration.

  By adopting Git for version control, IBM i applications can be managed with the same tools that are being used for development …

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