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RPG, XML, SOAP, and REST: Web Services for IBM i
October 14, 2015 Dan Burger
… Read moreAnyone following the evolution of Web services has seen the RESTful architecture gaining ground quickly on the traditional favorite SOAP architecture. Web development and particularly Web-based mobile development has welcomed REST. To keep up with demand, Krengel Technology has introduced version 3.2 of its RPG-XML Suite, which delivers new Web service capabilities to IBM i customers.
Krengel developed the RPG-XML Suite for RPG developers who, as the Krengel website notes, “have lived through creating Web services in RPG and Java without a well-packaged development toolset.”
Web service basics: An RPG program calls a Web service that resides on another machine.
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Eradani Lays Waste to API Payload Restrictions
November 15, 2023 Alex Woodie
Eradani Connect customers who need to pass large amounts of data to IBM i via external API calls have often been stymied by a built-in restriction in IBM i that limits their payload to a mere 16MB. Those customers will be thrilled that Eradani has launched a new big data connector that smashes those payload restrictions to smithereens.
Eradani Connect is a packaged application designed to simplify the creation and execution of API calls on IBM i. The software functions as a middleware layer that makes it easy for .NET, JavaScript, and Python developers to get access to the IBM …
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SOAP Web Services Fail After WebSphere Liberty Patched
December 5, 2022 Timothy Prickett Morgan
If you had not yet gotten around to putting the October 2022 HTTP Group PTF patches for the WebSphere Liberty web application server on your IBM i system, that may turn out to be a fortunate thing. There is something wonky about SOAP web services running in conjunction with Integrated Web Services (IWS v2.6) and Integrated Application Server (IAS v8.5) middleware on the IBM i platform that is causing SOAP fault errors.
This error is documented here by IBM, and the techies that we know are trying to figure out the full extent of the issue. Doug Bidwell, our …
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i2Rest Offers Native API Alternative to IWS
August 19, 2020 Alex Woodie
IBM i shops that want to expose their RPG applications as industry standard Web services have a few options to choose from. One solution they should keep on their list is i2Rest, which is a native ILE application that exposes RPG using modern OAuth2 and OpenAPI standards.
We first came across Alexei Baranov’s work back in 2012, when he was involved in the port of the SVN client to IBM i while working at a Moscow, Russia-based consulting firm. Soon thereafter, Baranov started working on developing Web services tools for IBM i.
The first version of his new Web …
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Rest4i Eyes Digital Transformation Via API
March 21, 2018 Alex Woodie
A new company headed by IBM i software veterans is beginning to turn some heads with a new product aimed at helping IBM i shops with digital transformation strategies. Rest4i, as the outfit is called, says its LXR framework turns IBM i into a lean, mean REST API-serving machine.
Stuart Milligan, who headed the UK software firm Databorough before it was sold to Fresche Legacy (now Fresche Solutions) way back in 2013, says LXR (pronounced “Lexer”) is the result of four years of investment and development in a “pure IBM i REST API solution.”
Milligan describes LXR as …
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HATS Finds A RESTful ‘Swagger’
November 13, 2017 Alex Woodie
IBM i shops will gain access to new API tooling on Thursday, when IBM ships a new release of its Rational Host Access Transformation Services (HATS) software that supports Swagger, a popular open-source specification for designing, generating, documenting, and consuming REST-based APIs.
APIs built using the Representational State Transfer (REST) protocol have become the primary way that companies expose their applications and data in a programmatic way. By defining one’s application program interfaces (APIs) in the RESTful style – as opposed to, say, the older, XML-heavy Simple Object Application Protocol (SOAP) style – companies can join in, and partake of, …
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IBM i, Watson & Bluemix: The REST Of The Story
June 21, 2017 Dan Burger
Integrated Web Services is nothing new for IBM i. But that doesn’t mean there’s nothing new in Web services. A couple of years ago, IBM introduced Bluemix, an integration framework that, among other things, allows applications on other systems to connect with business logic running on i. The Bluemix tooling was designed to consume REST APIs, which can be used to connect Watson and IBM i. That’s where the newness is evident.
The plumbing that’s necessary to make these things happen is being built by the IBM i development team led by Tim Rowe, business architect for IBM i …
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REST Services For IBM i In developerWorks Spotlight
February 4, 2015 Alex Woodie
… Read moreOne of the exciting new features added to IBM i in late 2014 is support for REST-based Web services. The rest of the world has accepted REST services as the de-facto integration standard on the Web, and now this approach is being supported within IBM i too. But how do you actually go about building and managing REST services in IBM i? Let the smart IBMers at developerWorks show you how.
REST services are very new to IBM i, having been announced by IBM just four months ago and delivered in late December 2014 with the various HTTP Group
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Eradani Taps GenAI for IBM i Integration Boost
October 9, 2024 Alex Woodie
Eradani introduced a new product last month that uses the power of generative AI to simplify the development of code for integration projects involving IBM i. The company says the new product, dubbed Eradani Assist, will allow customers to use natural language to tell the product to build specific application and data integrations, and the product will leverage one or more large language models (LLMs) to generate the integration code.
Eradani calls its flagship product, Eradani Connect, an “integration hub” that manages communication into and out of the IBM i platform. The software supports application and data integration projects that …
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Guru: Creating A Web Service With Basic Authentication
August 12, 2024 Mike Larsen
I have been working with web services for many years, and I usually use IBM’s IWS (Integrated Web Service) tool to create them. The tool provides a wizard-based interface that allows me to quickly create a web service from an RPG program. Recently, I created a web service that uses basic authentication, and I want to share my experience.
I am assuming that you are already familiar with creating a web server and a web service, so I am just going to show the steps that need to be taken to add basic authentication functionality. If you would like me …
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