Midrange Dynamics Hooks Change Management Into VS Code

May 10, 2023 Alex Woodie

Developers using VS Code to create native IBM i applications can now use Midrange Dynamics’s change management (CM) software to properly track their work. Midrange Dynamics North America (MDNA) announced at the recent POWERUp conference in Denver, Colorado. MDNA says Midrange Dynamics will also support Merlin in the future.

Demand for VS Code is currently booming among the IBM i installed base, who have been clamoring for a speedier alternative to IBM’s sluggish fat client, Rational Developer for i (RDi), for a long time. Thanks to Liam Allan and his Code for IBM i extensions, which enables ILE languages in the lightweight, open source integrated development environment (IDE), IBM i developers finally have the coding experience they have been dreaming about all these years.

While the developer experience in VS Code is snappier and more modern than in RDi, the older Java-based product has a few advantages over the young whippersnapper of an IDE. That includes having a mature ecosystem of utilities and plug-ins around it, particularly for application lifecycle management, including tracking code changes and automating deployment.

All of the vendors treading the IBM i change management waters support RDi and have for some time. While there are pockets of resistance among the greenscreen holdouts – who will give up SEU only when it’s pried from their cold, dead hands – the majority of the IBM i developer base has moved to RDi, the longtime Eclipse-based product that is as stable as it is slow to boot.

Now that the VS Code migration is in full swing, the developers of these utilities have a good reason to follow suit. Among the first of the IBM i change management vendors to support VS Code and Allen’s Code for IBM i extensions is Midrange Dynamics.

At COMMON’s recent user conference, MDNA announced that MDChange can now support VS Code development via MDOpen, its plug-in for open systems. That puts the full range of MDChange capabilities within reach of users working from VS Code, said Donna Westmoreland, the CTO of Midrange Dynamics North America.

“We’ve been working with Liam on the VS Code stuff and our stuff is all ready to roll,” Westmoreland told IT Jungle at POWERUp 2023. “We incorporated our change management platform, MDOpen, which connects into RDi originally and now it’s going to also be in VS Code. So we’ll have both of those IDEs available to our customers, of course along with green screen stuff that’s been there forever.”

While the MDOpen features are mostly the same in VS Code as in RDi, they may appear a little different and the navigation will be a little different than what IBM i developers in RDi are used to, Westmoreland said.

“It’s going to have a lot of the same functionality,” she said. “Some of it’s presented different because there is the ability to present it differently. Filters [will] show up in a different part of the screen, just because that’s the way VS Code works.”

It actually took quite a bit of work to get MDOpen to work with VS Code, largely because it lacked such a strong platform underneath, as RDi has in Eclipse, the IBM i change management expert said.

“Some of that navigational functionality wasn’t built into the [VS Code] product,” she said. “So we had to add things to make it very smooth for our end users and to have that same level of quality in the interface itself.”

The company selected REST Web services as the integration mechanism between VS Code and MDOpen, and actually used its own MDRest4i product to generate those REST services. It took some extra time and effort to get it right, but it was well worth it, Westmoreland said.

“I will have to give credit to the Midrange Dynamics team,” she said. “They took the time to go back and rewrite how MDOpen works so that they can do it to any interface going forward.”

The company is looking forward to also supporting Merlin, the IBM-sponsored offering that brings an open source, VS Code-based IDE delivered in a Red Hat OpenShift container. When IBM launched Merlin last year, it tapped Midrange Dynamics’ competitor, ARCAD Software, to supply change management for the IDE. But IBM has said it will open up Merlin to other vendors.

Midrange Dynamics has grown substantially in recent years. Much of that growth has come through replacing other change management vendors, predominantly the ones that have stopped adding new features, said Mary Langen, Midrange Dynamics North America vice president of operations and marketing. The ability to start small with an implementation and grow it over time has also appealed to new users, she said.

Since COVID, the company experienced significant growth in revenue and customer counts in the North American market, Langen said, and the company’s customer count now numbers in the hundreds. “It’s been a wild, fun run,” she said.

Having a flexible pricing model has helped Midrange Dynamics grow among enterprises and smaller shops alike, Westmoreland said.

“We have a significant number of LUG members,” she said. “The nice part about the way the product is designed and built is it can be scaled to a two-person shop or it can be a 200-developer shop. And the scalability of the product means that, from a pricing perspective, the customer gets the right price for their environment, because we do it with developer-based pricing and partition pricing, so it’s very fair.”

A smaller customer can get started with the Midrange Dynamics product set for an outlay in the $10,000 to $20,000 range, Westmoreland said. For more information, see www.md-na.com.

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