• Why Node.js?

  May 3, 2016 Aaron Bartell

  In case you haven’t noticed, IBM’er Tim Rowe and his team have been delivering a tremendous amount of open source the past few years–sometimes through vendor relationships and sometimes directly from IBM. While frequency has increased as of late, open source has actually been a mainstay on IBM i and its predecessors for a very long time. It started with the Apache web server, then Java, then PHP and MySQL, Ruby, Node.js, Python, and even more you haven’t even heard of. Open source (in particular Node.js) will be the topic of this article. But first, let me give you some

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• Dealing With Library Lists In RDi

  May 3, 2016 Ted Holt

  Note: The code accompanying this article is available for download here. Today I follow up on a topic that Susan Gantner covered a few years ago, namely, how to more easily manage the library list while working in Rational Developer for i (RDi). It turns out that a couple of commands I wrote for green-screen work years ago are even more useful in my GUI development environment. When you start RDi, the library list is set according to your user profile, but you can override the initial library list in the connection properties. As you work, you may

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• Refacing Your Database, Part 3

  May 3, 2016 Paul Tuohy

  In the preceding two articles, we saw how to extract, analyze and correct table and column definitions. In this, the final article on refacing your database, we look at some more options for re-representing data and, finally, generating a script to create the required views. Handling Numeric Date Fields One of the issues we need to handle is the representation of dates in the SASALHST table. Figure 1 shows how the purchase date is stored as a numeric field, the order date is stored as a year, month and day and the delivery date is stored as a century, year,

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• Surge of Services in DB2 for i, Part 2

  April 19, 2016 Michael Sansoterra

  Continuing where we left off in Part 1, a slew of new IBM i services (and enhancements to existing services) were released in IBM i 7.2 TR3 and IBM i 7.1 TR11. This article continues to detail some of the important new services. As always, keep in mind that just an overview is given here and that the developerWorks documentation or IBM i Services in the Knowledge Center should be consulted in order to understand the full capability of each service. SYSTOOLS.GROUP_PTF_DETAILS This view runs a real-time query against the IBM Preventative Service Planning (PSP) website and can indicate

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• View Scheduled Jobs with Excel

  April 19, 2016 Ted Holt

  At the recent RPG & DB2 Summit in Dallas, I presented a session that dealt with the use of SQL in CL. One of my examples used the SCHEDULED_JOB_INFO view to retrieve scheduled jobs from the IBM i job scheduler. After the talk, one of the attendees gave me a great idea, and I’ve just got to pass it along to you. SCHEDULED_JOB_INFO returns the same information that you can see with the Work with Job Schedule Entries (WRKJOBSCDE) command. It’s one of the IBM i Services. The gentleman told me that he and others in his shop had been

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• Refacing Your Database, Part 2

  April 19, 2016 Paul Tuohy

  The whole purpose of refacing our database is to give proper names to tables and columns. So we have to spend some time ensuring that our names are right. In this article, the second in a series of three, we continue the refacing process by analyzing and correcting our new naming. In my first article, we had reached the stage where we had extracted table and column definitions into our two conversion tables (TABLE_TRANSLATION and COLUMN_TRANSLATION), as shown below: Analyzing the Names Since the new column names were generated from the text descriptions of the original fields, there is

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• Surge Of Services In DB2 For i, Part 1

  April 5, 2016 Michael Sansoterra

  The IBM i 7.2 TR3 and 7.1 TR11 technology refreshes come with a glut of new services. If you are responsible for IBM i administration, you are guaranteed to be tickled pink with these great enhancements. My examples are to call general attention to the availability of these services and give ideas on how they may be used. However, I still recommend going to the IBM documentation on the DeveloperWorks site (or the IBM knowledge center) to get full information on the parameters and all columns used by these special views and table functions. For clarification, there are actually

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• Enable or Disable Code at Run Time

  April 5, 2016 Ted Holt

  If you program in RPG or C, you should know how to use compiler directives to enable or disable source code at compile time. IBM i programmers should also know how to enable or disable executable code at run time, and why they would want to do such a thing. Let’s talk about the why first. One good reason to enable or disable code is for trouble-shooting. You might find it valuable to include commands to: Display the job log Dump program variables Copy QTEMP files to another library Build spooled files (like of the type I showed how to

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• Refacing Your Database, Part 1

  April 5, 2016 Paul Tuohy

  Note: The code accompanying this article is available for download here. In this group of three articles, I will discuss a technique for refacing a traditional DDS defined database as an SQL DDL defined database. There will be no recreation of files or recompilation of programs, and it is not as much hard work as you think it might be. The stored procedures, functions, programs, and commands used in these articles are available in the library SQLFACE, which can be downloaded here. Before I get into the nitty gritty of refacing databases, I would just like to say

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• Installing PHP on Your Laptop

  March 29, 2016 Chris Ringer

  In my introductory article I walked you through a crash course in PHP. Now I will show you how obtain a free PHP development environment on your laptop in two easy installations of XAMPP and Netbeans. This allows you the freedom to configure PHP and test your scripts as you choose without affecting a production website or needing management approval. However, if you need to manage PHP scripts on an IBM i, you will want to alternatively explore using Zend Studio. This full-featured IDE integrates directly with the IBM i and allows you to write and debug scripts

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