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Featured Product: CNX
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Don't settle for screen scraping your way to the world wide web. . . Give your RPG programs a true Web 2.0 Interface!
Valence offers RPG Programmers a genuine Web 2.0 solution for the System i, combining simple ILE RPG procedures with a robust and easy-to-use JavaScript framework.
JUST RELEASED! Valence version 2.1 is now available! Includes new multilingual features, expanded AutoCode functionality, additional RPG procedures, back-end performance boosts and much more. New flexible licensing terms too!
See video demos of Valence in action
and download the community edition for FREE!
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March 13, 2010: Volume 12, Number 11
March 6, 2010: Volume 12, Number 10
February 27, 2010: Volume 12, Number 09
February 20, 2010: Volume 12, Number 08
February 13, 2010: Volume 12, Number 07
February 6, 2010: Volume 12, Number 06
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The heat is on. For all the talk about IT integration and innovation, words that get casually tossed around as if saying them was doing something, there is progress being made in the area of application modernization. The time for talk is turning into the time for action in the IBM AS/400 community, which IBM has renamed the iSeries, the System i, and now just IBM i. The lower case i, IBM used to be fond of saying, is for integration and innovation.
Keeping data in synch across Windows and System i applications used to be a largely manual chore for First American Bank (FAB), a mid-sized community bank located in Elk Grove Village, Illinois. However, after installing RevSoft's suite of systems management tools--including job scheduler, file transfer, and message management software--errors have been reduced, and operators can administer on an exception basis.
The big iron boxes in IBM's Power-based server lineup have always tended to come to market later than midrange and entry boxes. With the AS/400 and its progeny being predominantly a midrange platform, and the RS/6000 and its progeny proliferating in the low-end and only gradually coming to be known as a big iron box, it stands to reason that Big Blue would start the Power7 launch in the middle, with the Power 750, 770, and 780 servers.
A new release of Profound Logic's on-the-fly Web enablement tool, called Genie, will make it easier for customers to customize their i/OS applications just to their liking. With Genie 4.0, customers gain access to more than 150 "widgets" that allow them to quickly add screen elements such as images and drop-down boxes to converted applications. Better session handling, DBCS support, and new integration capabilities round out the new release.
Comparisons are odious, the old saying goes. But, that's what we do whenever we are buying any kind of electronics, and servers are no exception. IBM, like every other server maker with a new product, wants to show off the performance and scalability of its new Power7-based servers. But it doesn't want to make the comparisons too easy between the i and AIX platforms, or between the i versions of the boxes and other machines like X64 servers running Windows, as has been the case for many years.
While the recession has hammered overall IT spending during the last 18 months, some sectors of the industry are doing quite well. Rocket Software and its Seagull Software subsidiary, for instance, say they are experiencing a surge in demand for integration and modernization tools, as System i and mainframe users seek to eek more life out of their "legacy" applications as a result of the recession. Seagull hopes a new release of its LegaSuite Integration software unveiled last week will help it to capitalize on the trend.
The way disk array storage vendors have been talking for two decades, you would think that the day would never come when storage revenues would cease growing. Well, the economic meltdown last year sure saw that trend come to an end. But spending has taken off again as 2009 came to a close, and while it is too early to call this a recovery, much less a return to high growth, there certainly is more optimism in the storage racket now than a year ago.
Whitney National Bank, which recently installed the Silverlake core banking system from Jack Henry & Associates, is adopting IBM's Banking Industry Framework, IBM announced earlier this month. By adopting the framework, Whitney National will get access to decades-worth of IBM experience in the banking sector, which will better prepare the bank to adapt to existing and expected regulation, as well as customers' evolving expectations.
IBM is doing its best to foster a new company saying: "Nobody gets fired for buying IBM security." After being named the best security company by a leading security magazine, Big Blue confirmed why it's among the leading security research, consulting, and product development organizations when it unveiled a slew of new SIEM and network security tools, completed another security-related acquisition, and announced the formation of the IBM Institute for Advanced Security. Not bad for a week's work.
Stonebranch this month unveiled new releases of Infitran and Indesca, its respective managed file transfer (MFT) and suite of job scheduling agents for i/OS, z/OS, Unix, and Windows platforms. With the new version 4.1 releases of the products, Stonebranch has bolstered its capability for automating SAP environments, among other enhancements.
Maybe we should just call it Google/400 and get on with it?
DB2 for i supports the concept of union, which creates or derives a single result set table by combining two other result set tables, each of which was derived from a SELECT statement or another UNION. (See the discussion on cascading unions at the end of this article). A union is very useful when an SQL query must operate on two or more tables where JOIN cannot be used to produce the desired result set table.
System i shops that adopt QlikTech's Windows-based business intelligence software now have a new way to consume information, dashboards, and reports from their i/OS ERP systems: via mobile phones running Google's mobile phone operating system, Android.
Using global data (fields, variables and constants) is generally considered to be poor programming practice. One reason is that a subroutine or subprocedure that uses global data is not easily placed into service elsewhere. Another reason is that undesirable side effects may occur when one routine changes a variable that another routine uses. However, in some situations global data makes sense. I would like to provide one example.
If you are one of the avant garde of the i customer base that is using a mix of BladeCenter Power-based blade servers to run i 6.1 applications, or if you have some rack-based Power Systems machines mixed with System x boxes, then IBM has a new half rack for you.
My i/OS system performance hasn't been very good lately and my storage usage is starting to shoot up. I'm thinking I should IPL my System i 550 box to reset the system. Will an IPL help me regain storage and improve performance?
