• The App Dev World According To Gapp

  June 5, 2017 Dan Burger

  Somewhere in the tangle of business requirements and IT capabilities is the elusive goal of developing applications that perform well regardless of the device they run on. Can IT provide the user experience that meets the ever-changing business needs and users’ expectations? The answer, in many instances, is “not exactly.”

  The evolution of business applications has created many distractions, disruptions, and dissatisfactions. In some organizations, the evolution is ignored – nothing changes. In other organizations, shadow IT worms its way into departments that operate outside centralized control creating disparate degrees of lunacy and sorrow. Steve Gapp has seen it all …

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• DSI Delves Into IBM i Backup Software

  May 24, 2017 Alex Woodie

  Dynamic Solutions International (DSI) may be best known as a provider of virtual tape library (VTL) solutions for IBM i and other platforms. But now the Colorado company is getting into the software space with a pair of backup offerings designed specifically for IBM i environments.

  Conductor and Tracker were unveiled by DSI earlier this month prior to the annual COMMON conference in Orlando, Florida. The products were created to bolster the management of backups of the company’s VTL clients that are backing up from IBM i. But they don’t necessarily require a VTL at all, and, in fact, can …

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• BCD Presto Mobilizes Green Screen To Web App Dev

  May 24, 2017 Dan Burger

  Not every green-screen RPG application needs to be modernized. Some need it more than others. The squeaky wheel gets the grease. The same can be said for desktop apps. They don’t all have to be capable of rendering on mobile devices, but some need it more than others. Now BCD Software is helping in the decision making process by bringing responsive development capabilities to its version 7 release of Presto.

  Presto, of course, is BCD’s most popular modernization tool, while responsive design is the capability to design Web pages that display on any device desktop or mobile with a single …

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• CNX Kickstarts Development with Valence 5.1

  May 24, 2017 Alex Woodie

  A new release of the Valence Framework from CNX will enable IBM i shops to get more Web programming and modernization work done with even less effort than before.

  The Chicago-based company has been speaking the “less is more” mantra since the 2014 launch of Valence 4.0, one of the first releases that included Nitro add-on tools that handle tasks on behalf of the user. After all, why should the user get bogged down in the intricacies of coding JavaScript when software can do it instead?

  Nitro’s auto-coding capabilities are once again front-and-center in Valence 5.1, which CNX launched …

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• Four Hundred Monitor, May 24

  May 24, 2017 Dan Burger

  What’s more popular than a barbeque on a summer weekend? That’s easy. Steve Will, IBM i chief architect at the COMMON Annual Meeting. In his “You and i” blog, the Chief writes about the fun and the fundamentals of an IBM i technical conference.

  Proof that what goes around comes around is the chatter these days about running IT as a business. That means IT needs to make money not spend it. And do you know the top reasons for employees leaving their jobs? Hint: It’s not the money. One more thing . . . IT service providers are coming …

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• IBM i PTF Guide, Volume 19, Number 20

  May 24, 2017 Doug Bidwell

  The most amazing fix that Big Blue has ever done for the techies who administer and program the IBM i platform happened last week: After 16 years of playing the same snippet of song in a loop for those dying on hold waiting for the support line, IBM finally relented and changed its tune.

  I had to hang up and call back to have them put me on hold so I could verify that it was not an accident. Amazing!

  In this week’s IBM i PTF Guide, there is a bunch of stuff going on. The MQ for IBM …

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• Say Sayonara To IBM i 7.1 Next Spring

  May 22, 2017 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  We sometimes think that the IBM announcement system tries to pull a fast one on us. Like many people in this market, we watch this system like a hawk, looking for anything pertinent to Power Systems or IBM i. A very important announcement was made on April 11, well ahead of the COMMON user group meeting in Orlando, Florida, two weeks ago, but no one we know saw it. A business partner saw it late last week and alerted us to it.

  In announcement letter 917-080, Big Blue announced the date when IBM i 7.1 will see its software …

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• Top Ten New IBM i RFEs

  May 22, 2017 Alex Woodie

  Should IBM open source its database drivers, or add support for .NET? Should it add the latest SSL ciphers to IBM i 7.1? These are some of the changes that it has received through its new Web-based requests for enhancement (RFE) program on its developerWorks site.

  The new RFE functionality is only a few months old, but it’s already attracting the attention of IBM i professionals who want IBM to change things about the stack. It’s also getting attention from other IBM i pros who get to vote on them.

  Here are the top ten RFEs so far, ranked by …

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• Guru: Confessions Of A Recovering RDi Outline Addict

  May 22, 2017 Susan Gantner

  As an unabashed RDi fan, my list of “favorite features” is pretty long, but right up near the top of the list has always been the Outline view for RPG IV. It was Outline that finally got me to move to WDSC (RDi’s predecessor) from its predecessor, CODE (a.k.a., CODE/400) many years ago.

  I’ve long been amazed at the number of RDi users who say they don’t use Outline – some don’t even have it in their RSE perspective any more. I have always suspected that’s because they closed it by accident long ago and never had a chance to …

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• As I See It: Wake Up Call

  May 22, 2017 Victor Rozek

  Maybe she just didn’t want to carry a purse. Or maybe she liked to wear tight jeans and having anything in the pockets spoiled the look. Or maybe she wanted to keep it handy, or thought it was trendy or “dope.” But whatever the reason she, like a growing number of women, carried her cell phone tucked into her bra.

  She was 39 at the time of diagnosis, a Chinese woman, non-meat eater, with no genetic or lifestyle predispositions to cancer. Under the circumstances, what her doctor found was highly unusual: multiple primary tumors in her right breast. It was …

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