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Wanted: Code For IBM i Contributors
April 10, 2023 Alex Woodie
If you have a knack for IBM i development and a passion for open source, then Liam Allan, the creator of the Code for IBM i project, would like a word. That’s because Allan, faced with large demands from his day job at IBM, is seeking help from the IBM i community to develop and maintain the Code for IBM i project.
“Myself and the core team (three other people) are a little overwhelmed by our workload, balancing jobs and maintaining a large project is tough,” Allan wrote in a March 9 blog post on Ryver, the Web-based forum …
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The Steady Growth Of The Low Code Movement
December 14, 2022 Timothy Prickett Morgan
With IT talent in short supply and expensive as too much demand chases too little supply – a hard concept to get your brains around with over 42 million software developers working around the world creating and maintaining software that has an economic value in excess of $1 trillion a year – it is no surprise that some are looking to low code tools to help automate some aspects of their business.
Low code is not just happening in the datacenters of small and medium businesses writing new applications to take on new problems and add new functionality to systems. …
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Momentum Builds For Code For IBM i
November 7, 2022 Alex Woodie
Energy and excitement are building in the IBM i development community thanks to Code for IBM i, the VS Code extension that enables users to write and edit RPG and COBOL code in a Web browser. Spearheaded by Liam Allan, who now works for IBM, the lightweight alternative to RDi is approaching critical mass among IBM i developers desperate for something new.
For many years, IBM i shops had few options available to them when it comes to developing ILE applications for IBM i. IBM’s default recommendation was Rational Developer for i, the Java-based integrated development environment (IDE) that …
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If You Aren’t Automating Testing, You Aren’t Doing DevSecOps
October 17, 2022 Andrew Clark
If you are going to automate application development and operations like a hyperscaler, it is not as simple as moving code to a Git repository and then you are done. Security is critical to DevOps – so much that people are now calling it DevSecOps to highlight that fact. The “Sec” in DevSecOps impacts several phases in the development lifecycle – from code quality and security checking to developer-side unit tests and, further downstream, functional regression tests. Provided they are automated, each technique brings major savings in development by “shifting defects left.” In this article, we’ll explore how.
Today, …
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The Lucky Seven Tips Of IBM i DevSecOps
September 14, 2022 Olenka Van Schendel
The number seven has been a symbol of luck and fortune and design in many ancient cultures around the world, and so it is with the IBM i world. As it turns out, we think there are a “Lucky Seven” key tips for optimizing your own DevOps implementation, allowing you to leverage your IBM i platform for competitive advantage. And we want to share them with you.
The programmers who create applications for the IBM i platform and its decades of predecessors were given a set of development tools from IBM with augmentation from third parties such as ARCAD Software, …
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Transferring Low Code Benefits Into The IBM i
September 22, 2021 Eugene King
As with fashion, there are trends in the IT industry and history tends to repeat itself in several exciting ways. Development languages come into fashion, run their course, and then become obsolete. Then, they may be revamped with the addition of new criteria and frameworks. IBM i development also follows these same trends.
The low-code movement is not new but another iteration on traditional programming. Let’s do a brief history review.
At first, computer programming involved specific machine code associated with a particular processor architecture. Eventually, the language was slightly abstracted to facilitate second-generation assembler code, which was partially portable …
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The All-Knowing, Benevolent Dictator Of Code
November 6, 2019 Sebastien Julliand
Not every software project can have an all-knowing benevolent dictator looking through every line of code, and even all projects could have such a person to oversee the quality of the code, there is no reason to not automate as much of this very important code review job as is possible.
Luckily for IBM i shops, there is such a tool to help with code review, and in that sense, we suppose, you can install rather than hire that all-knowing benevolent dictator of application code. It’s called, appropriately enough, CodeChecker, and it has been available from ARCAD Software for quite …
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Guru: How Thorough Was Your Last Test? RDi Code Coverage Can Tell You
July 22, 2019 Susan Gantner
When you’ve made changes to one or more programs, you test all the changes – right? And, of course, you also test all the rest of the code just to make sure you didn’t break anything else. Did you do that with your last set of changes? Did you test ALL the code? Enabling you to answer that last question is what RDi’s Code Coverage facility is all about.
This is an introduction to Code Coverage — the basics of both why and how to use it. Before I go into how to run it, it may pique your interest …
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One Repository To Rule The Source – And Object – Code
February 4, 2019 Floyd Del Muro
(Sponsored Content) The concept of a single repository for source is not necessarily a new one. When I interviewed with ARCAD back in 2011, I did so at the at the Rational conference called Innovate in Orlando. The research and development team and our chief technology officer were already in dialogue with IBM to resell ARCAD technology alongside its Rational development suite, adding power to Rational Team Concert that development organizations could effectively have a similar repository for IBM i and open source applications.
At the time, RTC supported the open source world very well, just like Git …
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IBM i Salaries Drop Vs. Other Platforms, But It’s Not All Bad
September 6, 2017 Alex Woodie
Time was, working on IBM i and its predecessors earned you a premium on your salary compared to other platforms. That’s not the case in 2017, as equivalent jobs on the Linux, Unix, Windows (LUW) front delivers better pay. But the news on the job front is not all doom and gloom, according IBM i staffing expert Bob Langieri, who keeps a close watch on this sort of thing.
Across the board, IBM i professionals earned lower salaries than their LUW colleagues for various IT positions, with a few exceptions. That’s according to an analysis of IBM i salary data …
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