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Thoroughly Modern: Why Modernizing IBM i Applications Is Important And Where to Start

April 17, 2023 Pete Czornohus

I always like starting with a quote: “Everybody seems to talk about the weather, but nobody does anything about it.” The funny thing is that it’s starting to feel like it relates to IBM i application modernization.

Companies have talked about modernizing their RPG, COBOL, and CA 2E (SYNON) applications for decades, but a recent Fortra study said that 64 percent of IBM i shops are still considering IBM i modernization as one of their top five concerns. It’s worrisome that so many companies are considering it but not actively engaged in it.

In this article, we are going to …
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Longtime Product Guy Sarrasin Switches to Services

February 8, 2023 Alex Woodie

For two decades, Marcel Sarrasin was a product guy. Starting in 2001, Sarrasin helped to develop, market, and sell IBM i software, first for BCD, then Quadrant, and finally Fresche. But last year, Sarrasin got a change of scenery when Fresche promoted him to head up its growing services unit, giving the young executive a significant boost in responsibility and the chance to positively impact an important business line for Fresche: digital transformation services.

If you’ve ever been to a COMMON conference or attended a BCD, Quadrant, or Fresche Solutions webinar, there’s a good chance you’ve run into Sarrasin. For …
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Modernization Starts with the Business, and the Tech Follows

July 20, 2022 Alex Woodie

The COVID-19 pandemic sent shockwaves through business, changing the way companies operate and resetting customer expectations. Businesses that can’t keep up with these evolving needs face long-term headwinds in terms of competitiveness. Implementing a modernization strategy is paramount for companies in these situations, but where do you start?

While business closures from COVID-19 were bad, they could have been a lot worse. A 2021 study released by the Federal Reserve concluded that 200,000 establishments closed as a result of the pandemic. That was lower than a study from a year earlier that found 400,000 establishments could close. “Actual exit is …
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Thoroughly Modern: Improving The Digital Experience With APIs

April 11, 2022 Marcel Sarrasin

The world is an ever-changing place, and that means there is always something new that needs to be done to either improve applications running on the IBM i platform or to integrate them with other applications or interfaces on new kinds of devices. This is an important aspect of modernization, and one that often bridges the back-end databases and applications and the front-end interfaces through which end users access those applications – both of which need to be modernized, and often independently.

This is made possible by having application programming interfaces, or APIs, and if IBM i customers have tens …
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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: 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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Thoroughly Modern: More Than Just A Pretty Face

December 9, 2019 Greg Patterson and Mike Pavlak

The most difficult, thorny, and intractable problems can sometimes be effectively addressed, if not outright fixed, by breaking them down into smaller problems that can be addressed tactically while also hewing to a broader and deeper strategic plan.

That, in a nutshell, is the issue facing most IBM i shops that have not done much application modernization above and beyond pushing the display part of the code to a 5250 green screen emulator or maybe doing a little screen scraping to gussy it up a little bit. The reality is there are still an awful lot of IBM i shops …
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Thoroughly Modern: Why Modernizing IBM i Applications Is Important And Where to Start

Longtime Product Guy Sarrasin Switches to Services

Modernization Starts with the Business, and the Tech Follows

Thoroughly Modern: Improving The Digital Experience With APIs

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

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

Thoroughly Modern: More Than Just A Pretty Face

Content archive

Recent Posts

Subscribe

Pages

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