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Hybrid Release Management Means Creating An Application Schema
February 14, 2024 Marc Dallas
In a hybrid computing world, no application is an island and similarly no system running those applications and the databases underpinning those applications can be an island, either. And yet, many IBM i shops still behave as if they can be islands when it comes to application release management.
Despite this, based on our own experience and the anecdotal evidence we gather from IBM i shops like yours, there is a clear separation between release deployment in the IBM i world and the “other” release deployments in the enterprise. We need to talk about this.
First of all, application deployment …
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Four Hundred Monitor, February 14
February 14, 2024 Jenny Thomas
To some of you, three words that sound better than “I love you” might be “code compiled successfully.” Just a little Valentine’s humor before we get down to business this week. You will notice our social Calendar is really filling up with lots of new listings for events, so be sure to take a moment to see some of the great learning and networking opportunities that are available to you. In our Top Stories, it won’t come as a shock that AI continues to be a top headline, but we also rounded up some other IBM news to give you …
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2024 IBM i Predictions, Part Deux
January 22, 2024 Alex Woodie
How will 2024 unfold? Nobody knows the answer to that. But that’s not stopping members of the IBM i community from taking some swings. It’s not only a good Bayesian exercise to think through the probabilities of what may occur, but it’s often a bit of fun, too.
Our second batch of 2024 predictions starts with IBM distinguished engineer Steve Will, who, as the IBM i chief technology officer and IBM i chief architect, doesn’t need to guess where the platform is going, since he’s literally leading the creation of it. Instead, his prediction focuses on the community.
“2024 will …
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RDi and RPG Enhancements in the 2023 Fall TRs
October 25, 2023 Alex Woodie
RPG developers will see some compelling new features coming out of the recent Technology Refresh (TR) announcement from IBM, including enhancements to the RDi development environment as well as new capabilities in the RPG language itself.
RPG is nearly 65 years old, but like old dogs, the programming language can learn new tricks. The enhancements that IBM has brought to its venerable language with IBM i 7.5 TR3 and 7.4 TR9 continue a strong run of improvements, according to IBM i Product Manager Alison Butterill.
“Every one of the TRs since we announced 7.5 has had at least some RPG …
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What the Latest ALL400s Survey Tells Us About the IBM i Community
October 18, 2023 Alex Woodie
What is the most popular development tool in the IBM i community? What technology exists in nearly every shop? What BI tools are in use? And what activities are sitting in the IT backlog’s of IBM i shops? These are some of the questions that ALL400s answered with the latest edition of its IBM i community survey.
You may have heard about ALL400s as the comprehensive list of IBM i customers around the world. John Rockwell, the Florida man behind ALL400s, does his best to keep the list as updated as possible.
In addition to the list, Rockwell has put …
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Four Hundred Monitor, October 18
October 18, 2023 Jenny Thomas
“How do you eat an elephant?” The answer seems obvious. “One bite at a time.” The point being that you can’t complete a very large job or solve a very complex problem all at once, but you solve it by accomplishing one small task at a time and sticking with it until it is completed. The elephant in the room these days is application modernization. Many of you are tackling it within your organizations in many different ways, just like we report on it from many different angles. We start this week’s Top Stories with a quick opinion piece on …
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Take A Progressive Approach To DevOps
October 16, 2023 Jeff Tickner
As Gene Amdahl, the chief architect of the IBM System/360 mainframe, correctly observed and what was subsequently codified as Amdahl’s Law, any kind of system that implements any kind of process is only as fast as its slowest component. What is true of bottlenecks in human processes is equally true in systems design and also in that overlapping area known as DevOps – the confluence of application development and system operations.
If you can only be as fast as your slowest bottleneck, the converse is also true that you can speed up overall throughput of a workflow or a …
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Fall 2023 IBM i Tech Refresh Brings Something For Everyone
October 11, 2023 Alex Woodie
As expected, IBM yesterday unveiled its fall Technology Refresh (TR) for IBM i, with updates starting to become available on November 17. IBM announced no new products as part of the fall 2023 TR cycle, but it did spread the love around by giving just about everybody something to cheer about in IBM i 7.5 TR3 and 7.4 TR9.
Lots of different products that make up the IBM i environment will see some pretty meaningful enhancements with this release. If you spend a lot of time in Navigator for i or ACS, you will see new stuff. We haven’t had …
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The First Step In DevOps Is Not Tools, But Culture Change
September 25, 2023 Andrew Clark
The combination and automation of application development and IT operations, commonly known as DevOps, is itself like the processes it automates – it is a process of continual change through iteration and improvement. And so, like most things in life (other than vacation, maybe), it is a journey – not a destination.
When people think about a DevOps roadmap journey, they are typically thinking about putting in some kind of DevOps tooling like git or Jenkins; this is really not the place to start – the first step on the DevOps roadmap, for most companies, is actually a culture change. …
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Merlin Subscriptions Picking Up, IBM and ARCAD Say
September 13, 2023 Alex Woodie
Hundreds of IBM i shops have adopted Merlin since it was released last year, according to IBM and ARCAD, which jointly developed the development and code management tool. The addition of a subscription offering in early 2023 significantly bolstered sales activity, the companies say.
“In this last six months or so, we have really seen it tick up, which is exactly what we are expecting,” says IBM i Product Manager Alison Butterill, on the Merlin adoption curve.
Sales were a bit slow coming out of the gate for Merlin, the novel, browser-based environment for application development and change management on …
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