Loopback Hackathon Set for Next Week
January 11, 2023 Alex Woodie
The Loopback Hackathon organized by Common Europe last fall was such a hit that the organization is teaming up with COMMON North America for another hackathon next week. And like the previous hackathon, this one is also focused on using IBM i with Loopback, a popular Node.js framework for rapid development of REST APIs.
Mark Irish, an advisory software developer with the IBM lab in Rochester, Minnesota, was tapped to lead the first Loopback Hackathon, which took place in the Netherlands. Spearheaded by Common Next Gen, a youth-oriented group that’s part of Common Europe, the event was a big hit.
“We did that event in October, and it went really well,” Irish tells IT Jungle. “It was such a success they decided that they wanted a repeat of it, but for a worldwide audience.”
The three-day Loopback Hackathon starts Tuesday, January 17, and will be held online. Irish will lead 90-minute presentations on Loopback and IBM i for the first two days, and then participants can get their hands dirty with the Node.js framework running on live IBM i systems on Thursday, January 19. The event is free for all, but you must save a spot by registering at this link.
Nearly 100 people have already signed up for the event, which is being co-sponsored by New to i (N2i), the COMMON North America group dedicated to helping new users familiarize themselves with the platform. Apparently, this will be the first event co-produced by the two COMMON organizations on either side of the Atlantic.
“We’ve done joint webcasts,” says Alison Butterill, the IBM i offering manager, “but never a true event like this, where it’s hands-on.”
As the name suggests, the Loopback Hackathon is designed to be a hands-on event. After learning about Loopback and IBM i, participants will get a chance to work directly with the framework, which, like Node.js, runs on IBM i in a PASE environment.
Hackathons may not be common in the IBM i universe, but they’re fairly regular occurrences among younger folk who have come out of universities, says Irish.
You can register for the free Loopback Hackathon, which takes place online January 17-19, by clicking the image above.
“I think it’s kind of new, uncharted territory for IBM i,” Irish says. “I don’t know about too many hackathons on the system before this, so I think it brings that normal way that developers under 35 are used to doing these things to the IBM i platform.”
Irish participated in hackathons while studying computer science in college and found them to be really effective at bringing people together. “You find out that, oh this person over here knows how to XYZ. I know how to do ABC. Let’s sit next to each other and we can help each other out,” says Irish, who joined IBM in 2018.
Younger people in general are more likely to be familiar with the hackathon style of learning, but that in no way mean that older folks can’t participate. The Loopback Hackathon is open to people of all ages. Just be ready to move quickly, Irish says.
“Much like having some crunch deadline at work, you tend to work a little more intensively and faster, and maybe with a bit of adrenaline,” he says. “In most hackathons you have a time limit of two or three hours to do something. Here’s the technology, here’s the prompt, get it going.”
What’s more, no traditional “computer hacking” skills are required to participate (with apologies to the Napolean Dynamites of the world). In fact, rather than hacking computers, the Loopback Hackathon leaders will be taking great pains to ensure that security is a top priority when using Loopback to create APIs on IBM i. The hackathon will teach participants how to create encrypted HTTPS connections, and secure shells will be required to sign-on to the server.
“I’m a big proponent of Node.js, but I’m also a big proponent of security,” Irish says. “So we have big sections about how to secure these things the right way, teaching people right off the bat, you need to secure your REST API endpoints, not just hand waving it and saying ‘Oh yeah it’s a good idea later down the line to secure your REST API.’ Because I know that people will take that and forget about it and not do it and all of a sudden data is being sent over the Internet in plain text.”
And of course, users will also learn about Loopback, which is a Node.js framework for creating REST APIs. The framework, which uses TypeScript, has become popular in enterprise world as a low-code method for constructing REST APIs without explicitly coding them. Irish and his colleagues in Rochester see a lot of potential in Loopback to help IBM i professionals become productive with open-source software more quickly.
“It comes with a CLI [command line interface] that simplifies a lot of the heavy lifting that you would have to do,” Irish says. “When you use the CLI, it generates all the files that you need. If you have some kind of custom functionality that you need to implement, you probably need to go into the files and tinker around a little bit. But it probably generates four dozen files when you create an application, and thousands of lines of code that are just generated for you, to implement your REST API on top of. So it really is the best framework that I know of for really lowering that bar of, hey, I’m an RPG developer, how the heck do I get started with this technology?”
One of the neat aspects of the IBM i implementation of Loopback is the Db2 for i database connector that Irish and his colleagues created. The connector, which is built atop the standard ODBC connector, is able to automatically discover customers’ Db2 for i tables, which can really kickstart the REST API development process, he says.
“We call it discovery. It just goes and looks at your database DB tables,” Irish says. “It’s smart enough that, if you have foreign key constraints and everything, it can understand relationships between the tables. . . . It understands how to detangle all those sometimes-complex Db2 relationships.”
If learning about how to use Loopback to build REST APIs based on Db2 for i tables sounds exciting to you, then you won’t want to miss next week’s free Loopback Hackathon. You can register here: comeur.org/loopback-hackathon-registration.
