X-Analysis Archives

Fresche Overhauls X-Analysis With Web UI, AI Smarts

May 19, 2025 Alex Woodie

Fresche Solutions recently unveiled a new release of X-Analysis, its popular impact analysis tool, which it’s now selling under the Application Intelligence brand. The product has undergone a major overhaul and now sports a new Web user interface as well as hooks to popular AI models to provide code explanation and documentation capabilities for RPG applications.

Fresche Solutions operates a large application modernization practice and provides an array of products and services to help IBM i customers take their RPG, COBOL, and Java applications from the legacy past into the modern present. However, before a single byte of legacy code …
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IBM i Development Is Getting A Fresche Start With Some Ground-Breaking Subscriptions

November 27, 2023 Timothy Prickett Morgan

Cash flows into and out of a business, and capital expenditures are always interrupting those flows. They are yanked out of the revenue streams and depreciated over long periods of time, meant to reflect the value these expenditures deliver. In most cases in the IBM midrange, the machines sit around longer than the depreciation schedule the accountants use, and that is perceived as a kind of free money when it is really a kind of mounting technical debt as machinery and the software that runs upon it fall behind both technically and economically.

Eventually, the technical debt bill always comes …
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Thoroughly Modern: A Swiss Army Knife For IBM i Developers

December 5, 2022 Robert Arce

Our strength as developers and programmers lies not only in the code we write, but also in the tools we choose to surround ourselves with. The right tools are often the determining factor in how productive, efficient and accurate we can be – especially when working with large applications that we didn’t even write.

Long gone are the days of just managing a handful of programs, technologies, languages or databases, and relying on tribal knowledge to make critical business decisions isn’t just risky, it’s irresponsible. Especially when more and more experienced IBM i (AS/400) developers are changing jobs or retiring …
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Thoroughly Modern: Simplify IBM i Application Management and Extract Key Insights

October 10, 2022 Ray Everhart

IBM i developers and managers understand all too well that application documentation is often out of date – if it even exists. A study from the Singapore Management University says that developers only spend 5 percent of their time writing new code. They spend 20 percent of their time modifying legacy code, and they spend 60 percent of their time trying to understand the code before they modify it.

As businesses adapt to compete in their industries, IT is pressured to innovate and improve agility while maintaining existing systems. It’s also critical that stakeholders can quickly access data from …
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Thoroughly Modern: Latest IT Trends – Bring Security, Speed, And Consistency To IT With Automation

August 8, 2022 Alan Hamm and Chris Koppe

The irony of many IT departments is that they have spent many decades automating aspects of the business, literally encoding business processes and interactions with customers, partners, and suppliers to make those processes consistent and fast, but many of the processes used in the IT department itself are done manually and rely on the “tribal knowledge” of the system and application experts.

This is not only not necessary in many cases today, thanks to a myriad of automation tools that can be brought to bear on IT operations, but it is also dangerous and extremely risky. The systems that run …
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Thoroughly Modern: Augmenting Your Programming Today, Solving Staffing Issues Tomorrow

July 12, 2021 Leo Lymberopoulos

Do you have a back-up for when your programmers are on vacation? If not, where would you look to fill the decades of knowledge that is needed to support your RPG or COBOL applications? Who are you going to turn to when your star IBM i programmer – your only programmer – announces plans to retire at the end of this year?

Organizations that run IBM i applications have found themselves in some tricky situations. IBM i is a robust platform and your programmers have spent decades building and maintaining your applications to fit your business. However, as skilled RPG …
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ILEditor2: Satisfying The Need For Development Speed

April 28, 2021 Alex Woodie

Liam Allan doesn’t like anything to slow him down. “I’m impatient,” says the young IBM i phenom. So when he’s writing RPG or COBOL, the code editor had best keep up with him. That’s a problem using something like Rational Developer for IBM i (RDi), which Allan doesn’t particularly care for. And that is one of the primary reasons why Allan developed ILEditor, which is now in its second incarnation as ILEditor 2.

Just over a year ago, Allan and his business partner, Connor Holyday, shipped the first release of ILEditor 2. The pair had just completed an extensive …
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Fresche Unveils X-Replay for 5250 Testing

October 14, 2020 Alex Woodie

Fresche this week rolled out X-Replay, a new tool designed to automate the testing of 5250 greenscreen applications. Unlike other tools that work on screengrabs or X-Y coordinates, X-Replay software works at the field-name level, which makes test scripts more resilient to change, according to Fresche, which now boasts a complete lineup of IBM i testing tools.

Fresche has been providing tools for IBM i testing for a while now, mainly with X-Analysis, its cross-reference analysis tool, as well as X-Dataset, which ensures good management and security of data involved in testing. However, when it comes to testing 5250 screens …
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