• IBM Redpaper Guides You To IBM i Modernization Tools

  February 2, 2015 Alex Woodie

  When it comes to building modern IBM i applications, there’s no shortage of tools available on the market. Depending on your requirements–whether you’re staying in the comfy confines of RPG or are comfortable with something like .NET, whether you’re looking just for Web tools or adding mobile too–there are different directions you can go. A recently published IBM Redpaper can help guide you to a better understanding of the third-party tools on the market. IBM put a big focus on IBM i application modernization last year. After months of work and collaborating with the top experts in the field, it

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• As I See It: Asking The Big Question

  February 2, 2015 Victor Rozek

  Before she became an activist intent on changing the medical system, my wife’s doctor was so unhappy that she once thought about killing herself. And for doctors, that’s not unusual. Although it’s not widely publicized, physicians commit suicide at an alarming rate. By profession, they have the highest rate in the nation. Almost every physician has either thought of suicide, or knew a colleague who took his or her own life. For Dr. Pamela Wible, the source of their common misery was not hard to identify: Their purpose has been corrupted. Most aspiring physicians enter the profession as idealists, intent

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• IBM i Marketplace Survey Fills In The Blanks

  February 2, 2015 Dan Burger

  The IBM midrange community has a reputation for maintaining the status quo. But that doesn’t mean it’s immune to change. Shifts in the economy, the increasing pressures from business managers to do more with less, and the realization that competitive advantage comes with modernization combine to disrupt status quo thinkers. But does it really? Statistics that pertain to IBM i shops are almost non-existent. A new stack of information coming from a survey conducted by HelpSystems changes that. The complete results of the survey have yet to be made public. But I’ve learned a few things that are surprising. For

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• A Peek Inside IBM’s Merchant Power8 Processors

  February 2, 2015 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Big Blue may have sold off its IBM Microelectronics chip making division to GlobalFoundries, but it is still in control of the Power8 processor and it is still very much interested in creating and selling merchant versions of the Power8 processors that it has created for its own Power Systems server lineup. A new report released from chip industry watcher The Linley Group has taken a look at these merchant-class Power8 chips and how they fit into the systems market. Someday, a machine that an IBM i customer buys could end up coming from a third-party vendor, not from

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• DB2 Enhancements, Free Form RPG, Modernization Top Rowe’s ‘Big Hits’ List

  February 2, 2015 Dan Burger

  If you build it, they will come. It was a prophecy that came to be in a movie called Field of Dreams, but it’s no guarantee in the world of business computing and software development. Sometimes customers come and sometimes they don’t. Sometimes they come, but it’s at a pace that makes tortoise racing seem like speed skating. So I asked a guy who is up to his ears in IBM i software development what he thought were IBM‘s biggest success stories. The guy I went to was Tim Rowe, IBM i business architect for application development and

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• Knee-Deep In Ruby Waters

  January 27, 2015 Aaron Bartell

  In Testing The Ruby Waters I introduced you to Ruby and how to use irb (interactive Ruby shell) to easily run and test Ruby code. In this article I expound on that and introduce more features of the Ruby programming language as it relates to an IBM i programmer. In particular, Ruby methods and one form of encapsulation. Ruby is an object-oriented language; everything in Ruby is an object. But that doesn’t inhibit Ruby from being used in a more procedural approach. Below is a Ruby program named “say_hi.rb” with a method definition of “hi”, and then the invocation of

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• The Powerful SQL Upsert

  January 27, 2015 Ted Holt

  As you well know, a common task in business computing is to update an entity (customer, vendor, purchase order line, etc.) that exists, but add the entity if it doesn’t exist. In RPG this requires two operations–an update and a write–within a conditional statement. In SQL one statement handles the whole shebang. Here’s how it works. Here’s some RPG III code that illustrates the situation. FCUSTF UF E K DISK . . . code omitted C CUSKEY KLIST C KFLD COMP C KFLD ACCT C* . . . more code omitted C* HILOEQ C CUSKEY CHAINCUSTREC 99 C* . .

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• Everybody Likes Shortcuts! Part 2, Playing With Blocks

  January 27, 2015 Susan Gantner

  In my last tip on RSE shortcuts, I talked about shortcuts that help you find your way as you navigate through source members. Eventually, you find the place where you need to work with the code. So in this tip, I’ll concentrate on shortcuts to help with that, and specifically working with blocks of code. First let’s talk about selecting a block of code. There are many ways: You could drag your mouse over the block or hold down the Shift key and use the cursor arrow down key to select the lines for the block. The one I’ve

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• Reader Feedback On IBM i Wish List For 2015

  January 26, 2015 Hey, TPM

  First, my disclaimer. I have worked my whole life in the S/3X space: 31 years as an IBMer, last 10 working for the (now) IBM i brand and Rochester, then nine years working for IBM Business Partners. Next, my wish list (biased by the above): 1) I’d like to see graduated pricing for IBM i, regardless of software tier. One of the biggest impediments to sales of new footprints is Initial Purchase Price. P05 licenses of IBM i and its LPPs are very competitive. P10 is expensive and P20 and above are prohibitive. I’d like to see IBM make the

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• As I See It: Partisans and Mercenaries

  January 26, 2015 Victor Rozek

  Long ago in simpler times, I read a novel in which one character kills another with a credit card. I remember being dismayed that something so trivial as a credit card could be used as a weapon. It seemed there was no end to human ingenuity when it came to dispatching other human beings. By the time computers became militarized, I was no longer dismayed. It was obvious that a tool capable of amplifying human capacities would not be limited to the perfection of human nature. But with the growth of the World Wide Web, something unforeseen happened that sent

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