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New Extension Brings IBM i Closer to VS Code
August 11, 2021 Alex Woodie
When it comes to integrated development environments (IDEs), Microsoft is best known for its full-featured Visual Studio offering. But many developers have grown attached to its younger, free-er, and lighter weight cousin, Visual Studio Code (VS Code). And with the new VS Code for IBM i extension recently unveiled by Liam Allan, the skinny IDE’s integration with the midrange server is getting better.
VS Code for IBM i is an open source extension that allows developers to work with IBM i languages like RPG, COBOL, and CL within VS Code. Allan first released the product in February, but largely kept …
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VS Code Provides Another Coding Option for IBM i
December 9, 2020 Alex Woodie
IBM i shops that are looking for an alternative to IBM’s Rational Developer for IBM i (RDi) may want to check out a lightweight code editor from Microsoft called Visual Studio Code (VS Code). Thanks to extensions for IBM i languages developed by the opensource community, VS Code can support native development in RPG, CL, and SQL.
First released by Microsoft in 2015, VS Code provides a basic environment for writing and editing code. It features debugging, syntax highlighting, intelligent code completion, snippets, and code refactoring, as well as embedded Git. It runs on Windows, Linux, and Mac, and while …
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LANSA Revs Low-Code, UI Modernization Tools
October 2, 2019 Alex Woodie
LANSA is under new ownership, but that doesn’t appear to be slowing down the delivery of software, as the company has shipped a pair of product updates for IBM i and other platforms in recent months. That includes a new release of Visual LANSA, its flagship low-code development environment, and aXes, its screen modernization tool for 5250 apps.
In July, LANSA announced a new release of aXes, its tactical modernization tool for converting 5250 applications into Web interfaces. aXes, which LANSA acquired 10 years ago, provides a way for IBM i shops to convert 5250 screens on-the-fly without any …
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How To Have The Wisdom Of Experts Woven Into Your Code
October 14, 2024 Nicholas DeLessio
No matter how far you are down the road with your DevOps automation journey, or even if you’re not yet starting that journey, it’s probably a good idea to have a code checker; not everyone can have a Linus Torvalds review their work (as famously happens with the open source Linux kernel), but there are automation tools available for various languages and platforms that do static code analysis and they are the next best thing.
These tools, sometimes called “code linters” (because they remove the fuzzy bits out of application logic like actual linters remove imperfections stuck to our clothing), …
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Shield Revs HA Software for IBM i
September 25, 2024 Alex Woodie
Companies protecting their IBM i servers with Shield Advanced Solutions’ HA4i will enjoy several new capabilities when they upgrade to the latest release, including faster save while active processing, improved object compression, and new Nagios monitoring functions, among other enhancements.
Shield Advanced Solutions has been developing and selling an IBM i high availability solution since 2007, when it rolled out Receiver Apply Program/400 (RAP/400), which it dubbed “DR for the masses.” In 2010, the Toronto-area company overhauled that product and debuted its replacement, HA4i at version 6.1. Over the ensuing years, Shield steadily added new features to the …
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Untangling Legacy Spaghetti Code To Cook Up Microservices
August 12, 2024 Michel Mouchon
At this point in the history of programming, everyone pretty much knows what microservices are and everybody is more than acquainted with the legacy code – and often monolithic code – that has been created over decades by countless programmers who have evolved corporate applications to fit new conditions and new demands.
It is often called spaghetti code, and for good reason. The code is often a tangled mess of business logic and data – presumably the data is the meatballs and the user interface is the sauce in this metaphor. (It is important to not take a metaphor too …
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How To Contribute To IBM’s GenAI Code Assistant For RPG
July 15, 2024 Timothy Prickett Morgan
Back in October 2023, IBM launched its “Project Hopper” Watsonx Code Assistant for Z, which as the name suggests is a programming assistant that will eventually be built into the open source VS Code integrated development environment that was created by Microsoft and that is being explicitly trained to help programmers take applications coded in COBOL and convert them to Java. We speculated back then about how LLMs and GenAI might be used to do similar – and different – things for the IBM i platform, and back in May at the POWERUp 2024 conference Steve Will, the chief …
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What’s Cooking In Code For IBM i?
July 15, 2024 Alex Woodie
With IBM beginning to pull back on green screen development tools for IBM i, the importance of Code for IBM i to the IBM i development community has never been greater. The good news is that there’s a lot of development activity at the moment around the Visual Studio Code plug-in, with new features to replace some of the outgoing greenscreen functionality.
IBM announced that it was killing off some of the green screen development tools in its Application Development Toolset (ADTS) as part of its Technology Refresh (TR) for IBM i 7.4 and 7.5 in early May. Among the …
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Guru: Search Source Code For Strings Using SQL
October 9, 2023 Bob Cozzi
The IBM-supplied Find String Using PDM (FNDSTRPDM) command and PDM option 25 are how most developers scan for a simple value in a list of source file members. But what if you need more? For example, what if you want to find something complex, such as the field named “CUST” but not the field named “CUSTNAME” “CUSTOMER” or “CUSTNO”? Go ahead, I’ll wait?
While I do use FNDSTRPDM all the time, I now use the SQL READSRC (Read Source File Member) Table function more often.
READSRC SQL UDTF
The READSRC SQL Table function or UDTF (User-defined table function) uses an …
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How Long Before Big Blue Brings Code Assist To IBM i?
August 23, 2023 Timothy Prickett Morgan
IBM Research and Big Blue’s Software group have been collaborating to bring generative AI capabilities to market through the Watsonx stack of large language models and related tools. Watsonx is a basis for customers to create customized LLMs based on data from their own businesses and to integrate the quasi-cognitive capabilities of LLMs into their applications.
Watsonx is also being used by IBM to augment some tools of its own, and the most recent one that will be in tech preview in September and generally available sometime in the fourth quarter is called Watsonx Code Assistant for Z, which as …
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