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Midrange Dynamics’ Change Management Enhancements a Matter of Perspective
February 18, 2014 Dan Burger
A sequel to Escape from Alcatraz, that great old Clint Eastwood movie, is taking shape in IBM midrange shops. It’s called Escape from Green Screens. The plot is still being written and it won’t be done any time soon, but there are more shops using RDi with Remote System Explorer for editing source code. And the new free-form RPG coding is allowing RPG developers to escape green-screen development. A change management system (CMS) that works well in a modern development environment is a big advantage over CMSes that don’t–or no CMS at all.
Midrange Dynamics, for example, is
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Dropping Soon: IBM’s Big Application Modernization Redbook
February 4, 2014 Alex Woodie
Last year in Rochester, before the Polar Vortex swooped down and turned vast stretches of the Upper Midwest into arctic tundra, IBM convened a meeting of the minds like no other. Big Blue flew in dozens of IBM i modernization experts from all over the world to work on a forthcoming Redbook, with the idea of putting down on paper a complete guide for how to remake existing IBM i apps into sleek and powerful programs that will run businesses for decades to come.
That Redbook is almost complete. According to sources in the IBM i community, we’ll soon get
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Dropping Soon: IBM’s Big Application Modernization Redbook
February 4, 2014 Alex Woodie
Last year in Rochester, before the Polar Vortex swooped down and turned vast stretches of the Upper Midwest into arctic tundra, IBM convened a meeting of the minds like no other. Big Blue flew in dozens of IBM i modernization experts from all over the world to work on a forthcoming Redbook, with the idea of putting down on paper a complete guide for how to remake existing IBM i apps into sleek and powerful programs that will run businesses for decades to come.
That Redbook is almost complete. According to sources in the IBM i community, we’ll soon get
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Cloud Migration Service Shifts From IBM i To Linux
February 3, 2014 Dan Burger
Even though we don’t talk about it much, there are companies throwing in the towel and looking for IT solutions that do not include IBM i, Power Systems, or IBM. One of the companies with a track record of working in the IBM i migration business is Infinite Corporation, which last week introduced a new cloud-based migration plan called Infinite i. It will compete head-to-head with IBM i-based clouds.
Infinite has built its business on IBM i migrations and the integration of legacy applications with other platforms. In the past, this has involved existing on-premise systems, but cloud
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Mad Dog 21/21: Noshing Like Cronus
February 3, 2014 Hesh Wiener
IBM is a modern day Titan. In Greek mythology, the Titans were children of Uranus who preceded the Olympian Gods. If an observer were to pick one Titan to compare to IBM, it would be Cronus, whom the Romans called Saturn. Cronus ate five of his children in an effort to preserve his power, the way IBM has eaten the compatible mainframes and Power and mainframe emulators its technology spawned. A sixth child of Cronus, Zeus, eluded that fate, as the PC did in IBM’s case. In the end, Zeus deposed Cronus.
Cronus: Peter Paul Reubens painted Cronus eating
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RPG OA: Open Opportunity, Open To Interpretation
January 27, 2014 Dan Burger
If Tim Rowe, the business architect for application development at IBM, had one wish it might be that application modernization would flourish in the IBM i community. Last week, he was the guest speaker at OCEAN user group meeting in Orange County, California. He agreed to talk with me on the topic of RPG Open Access, a technology that was introduced with much fanfare with the IBM i 7.1 release of the operating system. That was in 2010.
Rowe is a vocal proponent of modernizing RPG applications. He believes RPG OA will play an important role in application modernization
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Allow Repeated Change With SQL Triggers
November 20, 2013 Paul Tuohy
In my previous article, I described how an RPG program as a before trigger, could be used to synchronize two columns in a table. There is an alternative. Instead of using an RPG trigger, we could have used an SQL trigger. An SQL trigger allows us to be more specific about when the trigger is activated and also has the advantage of portability to other database management systems.
The scenario was where a date, stored as a packed numeric column, was to be converted to a proper date field. This was accomplished by duplicating the packed numeric column (and
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Big Data Gets Easier to Handle With IBM i TR7
October 14, 2013 Alex Woodie
IBM i shops are struggling to adapt to big data, just like organizations that use other types of servers to store their data. Whether it is email messages, social media posts, or a sequential list of invoices dating back to 1978, you will find it squirreled away inside of some DB2 for i database, somewhere. Keeping up with the growing volume of data sets should be easier as a result of the enhancements IBM will deliver next month with IBM i 7.1 Technology Refresh 7 (TR7).
The IBMers in Rochester refer to the really big databases using the acronym VLDB,
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Just Watching Or Making An IBM i Modernization Plan?
September 30, 2013 Dan Burger
Move deliberately. Move carefully. But for the love of Frank, just move. Get started with an application modernization project. Evolve or dissolve might be putting it a little too harshly, but there are plenty of business reasons for modernization. Three that come to mind are data integration, data accessibility, and a user interface that promotes the first two. The IBM midrange community–known by the greater IT community as “those legacy dinosaurs,” has a boatload of successful app modernization achievements. The majority of the boats are still at the dock, unfortunately.
“A lot of our IBM i companies are bleeding edge.
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Something New For Enterprise Mobile
September 30, 2013 Dan Burger
One of the reasons companies shy away from projects such as mobile computing and application modernization is because they don’t have the skills and/or the time to devote to the project. It’s a fairly common occurrence given that most IT departments are short-staffed and modern skills training doesn’t fit into the schedule or the budget. And if you think that only happens in small and midsize organizations, you haven’t talked with ClearBlade‘s Eric Simone.
Simone works with large enterprises–mostly in the banking, insurance, and healthcare fields–that depend on big iron: Power Systems and mainframes. Many of these, he explains,