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Guru: With Procedure Driven RPG, Be Precise With Options(*Exact)
June 3, 2024 Gregory Simmons
Introduced to the RPG language in V7R2 TR1 and V7R3 TR7, the Options(*Exact) enables RPG programmers to adopt a more defensive coding style. Defensive coding is something all developers should be practicing.
DISCLAIMER: The edibility of the mushrooms listed in my test program are purely to give the program a little context and make it interesting. Their edible status is from the publication by the Missouri Department of Conservation called A Guide to Missouri’s Edible and Poisonous Mushrooms. Before foraging for and/or consuming any wild mushroom, do your research and be safe.
**Free Ctl-Opt Main(Test_Exact_Options); Ctl-Opt Debug Option(*SrcStmt:*NoDebugIO);
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Guru: Testing URLs With HTTP_GET_VERBOSE
May 20, 2024 Gregory Simmons
In my previous article Fooling around with SQL and RPG, I explored having a little fun with the HTTP_GET function to fetch a witty Dad Joke from https://icanhazdadjoke.com/. In this article, I want to demonstrate a more practical use of this great function. Or should I say, another version of HTTP_GET, that is HTTP_GET_VERBOSE, which also was introduced to us by the DB2 team in V7R3.
In its simplest implementation, I can insert the URL I want to test into an SQL statement:
select * from table(QSYS2.HTTP_GET_VERBOSE('https://icanhazdadjoke.com/',''))
I will later want to run this embedded in an RPG …
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Database Enhancements Galore In Spring 2024 IBM i TRs
May 13, 2024 Alex Woodie
The IBM i server is a database machine at the end of the day, so it’s not surprising that the latest technology refreshes (TRs) focus heavily on enhancements to Db2 for i. From new aggregate functions for the query optimizer to new and improved SQL-based IBM i services, there’s plenty of database goodness to go around in these releases.
On May 7, IBM announced IBM i 7.5 TR4 and 7.4 TR10. You can read the announcement letters for the two releases here and here. The functionality for the two releases, which will become generally available on June 14, is …
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Spring 2024 IBM i Technology Refresh Unveiled by IBM
May 8, 2024 Alex Woodie
IBM today took the wraps off the latest Technology Refresh for the IBM i platform. When IBM i 7.5 TR4 and 7.4 TR10 ship on June 14, customers will find enhancements such as Merlin version 2, new features in Navigator and ACS, security improvements, a couple of RPG enhancements, HA and DR enhancements, and a host of new SQL-based database services, among other capabilities.
In addition to new features, which we’ll get to in a second, the launch of IBM i 7.5 TR4 and 7.4 TR10 is important for an unexpected reason: It will mark the beginning of IBM’s transition …
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Four Hundred Monitor, May 8
May 8, 2024 Jenny Thomas
Yesterday was announcement day for IBM, which is always an exciting day for our community. We were right on top of it here in the Jungle, releasing two breaking news pieces to cover the launch of Power S1012 and the latest Technology Refresh for the IBM i platform. You can read both articles in our Top Stories section below, and you can be assured that it is only the beginning of our coverage as we will continue to dissect what we’ve learned and research more details for you. Enjoy this week’s edition of Monitor!
Top Stories From Around The Jungle
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DevOps Means Using The Tools You Already Have Better
April 24, 2024 Jeff Tickner
In this world, there are always more than two ways to skin a cat, but the best way to skin any cat is the way you already know how to do it.
The same is true of application development from within a DevOps toolchain. When modernizing development processes on IBM i, the most efficient thing to do, always, is to make use of enterprise tools already in place within the organization and integrate these into a cohesive IBM i workflow that shepherds code from idea to production all along the way.
It may seem obvious to say so, but trust …
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Four Hundred Monitor, April 24
April 24, 2024 Jenny Thomas
Million, billion, trillion. The way these words get thrown around has made us desensitized to what they really mean. But we did stop short when we saw a story asking if IBM could become a trillion-dollar stock by 2030. You will have to read the top headline below to see how realistic of a goal that is, but if Nvidia, Microsoft, and Apple can do it, why couldn’t Big Blue? Read on to consider that, and get the rest of the headlines of the week. Plus, don’t miss our growing Chats, Webinars, Seminars, Shows, and Other Happenings section. There are …
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Four Hundred Monitor, April 10
April 10, 2024 Jenny Thomas
East Coast residents in the U.S. were all shook up last week after a 4.8-magnitude earthquake centered near Lebanon, New Jersey. The tremor was felt as far away as Baltimore and the Massachusetts-New Hampshire border. Thankfully, no life-threatening injuries or major damage were reported, and that includes all the machines in IBM’s Poughkeepsie facility, as you can read about in our Top Story below. This natural near-catastrophe is a good reminder that physically securing your machines is just as important as the data inside them. We’ve got some more industry news and events for you to catch up on below, …
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What the 2024 Marketplace Report Says About IBM i App Dev, Language Use
March 13, 2024 Alex Woodie
What languages, development environments, and tools are IBM i developers currently using to create new applications? How many users are still on SEU? And how are VS Code and Merlin faring among Web-based development tools? Fortra sought to answer those questions with its IBM i Marketplace Survey for 2024, and the results may surprise you.
In late 2023, Fortra surveyed 270 IBM i professionals from around the world for the 2024 IBM i Marketplace Survey, which it published in January. You can download the report here.
For the most part, Fortra asks the same questions every year, which is …
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Guru: Procedure Driven RPG And Adopting The Pillars Of Object-Oriented Programming
February 19, 2024 Gregory Simmons
The four pillars of object-oriented programming (OOP): abstraction, encapsulation, inheritance, and polymorphism, were not created at a single point in time. They evolved gradually over several years, with contributions from various researchers and programmers. Here’s a brief overview of their evolution:
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Abstraction:
- Alan Kay is credited with introducing the concept of abstraction in the 1960s with his work on Simula.
- Abstraction gained further traction with the development of Smalltalk in the 1970s.
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Encapsulation:
- David Parnas, in his 1972 paper “On the Criteria To Be Used in Decomposing Systems into Modules,” laid the groundwork for encapsulation by emphasizing the importance of
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