What the 2024 Marketplace Report Says About IBM i App Dev, Language Use
March 13, 2024 Alex Woodie
What languages, development environments, and tools are IBM i developers currently using to create new applications? How many users are still on SEU? And how are VS Code and Merlin faring among Web-based development tools? Fortra sought to answer those questions with its IBM i Marketplace Survey for 2024, and the results may surprise you.
In late 2023, Fortra surveyed 270 IBM i professionals from around the world for the 2024 IBM i Marketplace Survey, which it published in January. You can download the report here.
For the most part, Fortra asks the same questions every year, which is helpful for detecting how usage of IBM i evolves and changes over periods of months and years. But it changed things up a little bit for the 2024 report when it came to surveying users about their application development tool and integrated development environments (IDE) usage.
Starting with the 2018 report, the company (formerly known as HelpSystems) asked users whether or not they used Rational Developer for i (RDi), which is IBM’s flagship IDE for IBM i (although it’s developed by Fortra as part of their partnership). For the 2024 report, Fortra asked “What application development tools are you using?”
The results: A whopping 80 percent report using Application Development Tool Set (ADTS), which includes the legacy, green-screen programing tools SEU and PDM and hasn’t been updated in many years.
IBM i Marketplace Survey for 2024.
IBM i Chief Architect, CTO, and Distinguished Engineer Steve Will was philosophical about the persistency of ADTS.
“When I talk to clients . . . in general, most of them aren’t using it to do large development projects, but 80 percent of our customers still find needs to just quick spin up SEU or PDM and do something quick,” he said during the January 23 webinar where he and others presented the survey findings, which you can watch on YouTube.
When Jesse Gorzinski, the IBM business architect for open source, asked the IBM i community last June whether SEU should be killed, about 72 percent of the voters said “definitely not” or “probably not,” while about 28 percent said “definitely” or “probably.” Both Allan and Gorzinski voted to remove it from IBM i.
RDi was used by 56 percent of the survey takers, which is down 12 percent from the previous year. The high-water mark for RDi appears to be in the 2022 report, when 71 percent of survey-takers said they owned RDi.
Fortra said 37 percent of survey-takers said they use VS Code, which helps to confirm that the open source product is having a run of real success in the market at the moment. VS Code’s success seems likely due in large part to Liam Allan’s Code for i, which is a VS Code plug-in that allows developers to write programs in ILE languages, as well as IBM’s decision to unhook the debugger from the compilers. While this is the first year Fortra asked about VS Code (and hence hard data is scarce), the broad adoption of VS Code seems likely to be a factor in the drop in RDi usage.
However, what might be even more surprising is that Merlin, the joint IBM-ARCAD Software offering that combines a VS Code-style Web-based development environment with Git, IBM i change management tooling from ARCAD, and Kubernetes, garnered just a 1 percent share. Merlin was launched in May 2022 to great fan fair, and had been purchased by “hundreds” of customers, IBM told IT Jungle in September.
Will took it all in stride. “The fact that more than half of our clients are using RDi is a great thing to know,” he said. “The growth of VS Code, which is incredibly powerful as a development tool, is great to see. And again, these numbers don’t add up to 100 percent because most people use more than one tool, and every once in a while they need to use that ADTS stuff. While I would prefer that we put things in our other tools like RDi, Visual Studio Code, and Merlin that encourage people to not have to do that [i.e. use SEU and PDM], again, we’re not taking things away.”
2024 Fortra IBM i Marketplace Survey Results
Things were rather sedate on the language front. A year after RPG use suddenly “skyrocketed” to 93 percent in late 2022, the IBM i platform’s most popular language settled back down to the high end of its historical range of 89 percent in late 2023, which is when Fortra conducted its survey.
There were two other languages that saw 4 percent year-over-year drops in reported usage: Control Language, which declined to 66 percent; and COBOL, which dropped to 16 percent. Several other languages recorded slight drops, too, including SQL (down 2 percent to 78 percent), PHP (down 3 points to 18 percent), Node.js (down 2 points to 18 percent), and C++ (down 2 points to 9 percent). Java held steady at 42 percent, while Python remained at 20 percent. The percentage of IBM i survey-takers using .NET/C++ went up 1 percent to 10 percent, while Perl use went up 1 point to 2 percent. Ruby held steady at 1 percent.
Considering that the only reported increase in language use were the 1 percent gains for .NET/C++ and Perl, and that the “other” category remained unchanged at 6 percent, the logical conclusion would be that overall language use slightly consolidated at the end of 2023. In other words, the average developer used fewer languages to develop his or her application.
The slight shrinkage in language use didn’t seem to concern Fortra, which reported in the Survey Results that it’s seeing more developers using a combination of languages. The fact that free form RPG “looks and acts like other languages…also makes it easier to teach,” the company said in both the 2023 and 2024 reports. “This is promising for the future of IBM i and can help to close the IBM i skills gap.”
Will noted that Free Format RPG was continuing to be broadly adopted, which helps to make the language stronger and more widely used.
“That ability to have a free format RPG that’s so much easier for younger people to learn …that’s great to see,” he said. “We still have to figure out how to address those folks who are using fixed-format or even worse, the non-ILE RPG stuff. But again, those are running their businesses and there’s no reason to force them off, but we certainly have advantages to moving them forward.”
While RPG is still very widespread on IBM i, you can expect to see more adoption of open languages, Will said.
“It’s great to see the people are continuing to write new stuff,” he said. “But there’s a whole group of what we call open languages from Java down to Python, PHP, Node, etcetera, that have significant usage and we’re going to see more and more of that as people do more service-oriented modernization.”
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80% is using PDM/SEU as per statistics and still IBM refuses to keep them updated with the language PTF lifecycle?
It is the stock editor, at least they should update the syntax checkers for RPG-free. It’s like saying unix without updated emacs/vi/nano… they are “old” not obsolete.
Maybe they are too busy reinventing licensing, sorry to disturb you.