IBM Banking on Merlin 2.0 to Goose Modern Development on IBM i
June 19, 2024 Alex Woodie
IBM last week shipped most of the new stuff unveiled in the Spring Technology Refreshes, which includes Merlin 2.0, the Web-based application development and modernization environment for IBM i. Big Blue is betting that the new and improved offering will encourage IBM i shops to (finally) begin their journey toward truly modern coding techniques.
Friday, June 14 marked the start of general availability for the majority of the features IBM is including in IBM i 7.5 TR4 and IBM i 7.4 TR10, which it announced on May 8. The version 2.0 release of Merlin – whose official IBM name is IBM i Modernization Engine for Lifecycle Integration – is one of the bigger pieces of news, as it marks a significant upgrade from the first release, which IBM launched back in May 2022.
The introduction of Merlin represented a big shift in IBM’s approach to application development on IBM i. Until to May 2022, the IBM party line for decades was to use Rational Developer for IBM i (RDi), its fat-client, Java-based integrated development environment (IDE). But as Web-based IDEs like Microsoft’s VS Code quickly gained momentum across the developer community, IBM was forced to embrace the shift to lighter-weight IDEs.
With Merlin 1.0, IBM adopted a browser-based IDE for the first time. In addition to the VS Code-derived IDE, Merlin came pre-loaded with open-source DevOps tools, like Git and Jenkins, as well as a host of IBM i coding utilities from partner ARCAD Software. And it bundled it all up in a Red Hat Open Shift container and sold it to IBM i shops.
Nearly all of those components have been upgraded with Merlin 2.0. For starters, the IDE itself is now based on VS Code proper, as opposed to two Eclipse projects, Che and Theia, that provide open-source versions of proprietary VS Code. Tim Rowe, the IBM i business architect for application development and systems management at IBM, explained to IT Jungle why the change is significant.
“Microsoft hadn’t open sourced the VS Code development space, which is DevSpace [back in 2022 when IBM first launched Merlin],” he said. “It’s now there, so we’ve pivoted and we rewrote the backend and we removed the Eclipse Che support and we’re now at DevSpace, which means that all the stuff that’s part of our Code for i project becomes Merlin out of the box, which is really exciting because it does provide a better experience for the developer.”
As Rowe mentioned, the integration of the Code for i plug-in is another big improvement for Merlin. Before officially becoming an IBMer on July 1, 2022, Liam Allan created Code for i to enable IBM i developers to write ILE programs in VS Code instead of RDi, an IDE that brings him great displeasure.
Code for i was already growing quickly before IBM released the Db2 for i database extensions for VS Code in October 2023. All that Code for i goodness, including VS Code support for IBM i debuggers, now comes out of the box with Merlin 2.0 (although Merlin had access to the IBM i debuggers since the Fall 2022 TRs were shipped).
Merlin provides a modern development experience for IBM i.
The database extensions alone are worth the price of admission, according to Scott Forstie, the IBM business architect for Db2 for i.
“We’re extending in the database extensions database tooling for the VS Code for i developer to deliver that awesome developer experience,” Forstie said. “Because if it didn’t include the database component, we can’t be awesome.”
Another big change to Merlin resides in the packaging. With version 1.0, customers had to provision a full Open Shift cluster in which to run Merlin. With version 2.0, customers now have the option to run Merlin on a single server, dubbed Single Node OpenShift (SNO).
Choosing SNO will reduce the footprint of Open Shift and provide greater simplicity, according to Rowe. That will resonate with smaller IBM i shops that don’t have the resources to provision a large development environment, he said.
“It certainly is really interesting when you start thinking about somebody who has a small Power system,” Rowe said. “It easily runs side by side on your IBM i, leveraging some of the other resources on the Power box. It also fits in the cloud world nicely, too.”
You could even run SNO and Merlin 2.0 on a laptop, Rowe said, “if you had a big enough laptop.”
Last but not least, the ARCAD components have also been upgraded and enhanced in Merlin 2.0. Merlin ships with ARCAD products, Builder and Observer, that help IBM i integrate with open source Git and Jenkins tools for source control and CI/CD, respective. It also ships Transformer, a utility for automating the conversion of fixed-length RPG to free-form RPG.
Fortra’s IBM i Marketplace Survey for 2024.
Sales of Merlin haven’t broken any records so far, but plenty of IBM i shops have kicked the tires on the product. IBM is hopeful that the combination of Merlin 2.0, as well as the hosted version of Merlin that customers can access in the cloud, will finally push these customers to get serious about upgrading their development processes.
“The principles of Merlin that we’ve put out, which is modern development, leveraging Git, VS Code, modern RPG pipelines, and doing DevOps-like things – the messaging . . . is getting huge adoption,” Rowe said. “People are interested. I have discussions on an incredibly regular basis. We have a number of customers that are actively looking at Merlin and they’re doing POCs. So we’re continuing to see the market interested in modern development and Merlin is certainly a piece of that, an important piece of that puzzle.”
Unfortunately, many IBM i developers continue to use old tools, such as SEU and PDM, and old techniques (pushing directly to production). Regulations such as Sarbanes-Oxley ostensibly should have forced shops to implement a separation of duties between development and deployment, but many IBM i shops continue to sling code the old way.
“I was talking about modernization at the beginning of the 2000s,” Alexandre Codinach, ARCAD’s vice president of sales and operations for the Americas, told IT Jungle at the recent POWERUp conference. “But there are still people asking at the booth ‘Would you have something to convert S/36 programs.’ Really guys? It was already old when I started my career!”
Breaking old habits is hard, and the IBM i installed base is full of folks who have a lot of old habits. The introduction and continued enhancement of Merlin – ARCAD and IBM are already in talks about what will go into Merlin 3.0 – show that IBM is serious about tackling the problem.
“It’s not 1984 anymore,” Rowe said. “Merlin’s not the problem. The biggest problem for most of our customers are their appetite to change their development, to do it in a modern manner.”
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Evading the Big Blue Name Police
“The principles of Merlin that we’ve put out, which is modern development, leveraging Git, VS Code, modern RPG pipelines, and doing DevOps-like things – the messaging . . . is getting huge adoption,” Rowe said (June 2024).
“What we decided that we really needed to do was to create a code assistant that could help programmers’ existing RPG, not move from RPG to something else,” said Will. (May 2024)
There must be some kind of way outta here
Said the joker to the thief
There’s too much confusion
I can’t get no relief