• Boutique Footwear Company Finds A Great Fit With Node.js

  August 19, 2019 Alex Woodie

  As one of the premier providers of winter footwear in North America and Europe, Kamik knows what it takes to run a successful manufacturing operation. But when its custom RPG-based ERP system started to show its age, the company turned to Node.js to help modernize production systems, and found that it improved application integration and developer productivity along the way.

  “Legacy” is a word that the folks at Kamik can take pride in. Founded in Quebec in 1898, Kamik remains a family owned business to this day, with factories located in Canada and the United States. Through its brand-name and …

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• Midrange Dynamics Speeds Table Updates In Db2 Mirror Clusters

  August 5, 2019 Alex Woodie

  With the launch of Db2 Mirror with IBM i 7.4 in June, IBM heralded the age of continuous availability on the midrange platform, bringing IBM i up to par with Windows and Linux platforms. However, while the new software keeps production data in perfect synch, it’s not so great at keeping up with changes to underlying database tables. That’s an area that Midrange Dynamics is addressing with its change management software.

  With Db2 Mirror, IBM has essentially extended a single-server database implementation into a clustered database with two active nodes. As soon as a piece of data is created, updated, …

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• Remain Breaks New Ground With ALM Suite

  July 15, 2019 Alex Woodie

  Coding season just ended for Remain Software, the Dutch application lifecycle management (ALM) vendor with a growing US presence. That means customers are sorting through a torrent of new functionality in its flagship TD/OMS product, including improved hooks to DevOps tools like Git and Jenkins, a new cross-platform cross-reference module, and a nifty API generator too.

  New stuff started emerging from Remain Software around the POWERUp conference in May, when IT Jungle sat down with company representatives to talk about development trends, current and upcoming releases of Remain’s software, and what customers are looking to get next.

  Arguably the biggest …

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• CNX Welcomes 5250 Apps Into Valence Framework

  June 12, 2019 Alex Woodie

  For years, CNX has prided itself on providing the IBM i community with development tools for creating modern Web applications on the platform. The company looked unapologetically to the future, and encouraged customers to move on from their green-screen pasts. But in response to strong customer demand, the company has relented and decided to allow green screens into the framework via an innovative new Web-based emulator dubbed Fusion5250.

  Fusion5250 is all about giving customers choice, CNX says. The software, which is a core new feature in Valence 5.2+, lets Valence customers access a modern application developed with CNX’s Nitro App …

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• Fresche Bullish On ‘Factory’ Approach As IBM i Market Improves

  June 5, 2019 Alex Woodie

  Factories offer a level of repeatability, predictability, and efficiency that make the manufacture of goods simpler, less risky, and more profitable than it would otherwise be. Now the folks at Fresche Solutions are taking a factory-based approach to a markedly different endeavor: the modernization of IBM i applications. The early returns from Fresche indicate some optimism may be in order.

  Last week at the POWERUp conference in Anaheim, California, Fresche Solutions CEO Andy Kulakowski and his team spoke at length with IT Jungle about its new factory approach to selling modernization software and services, as well as the recent successes …

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• Guru: Application Tracing With The QTRC APIs

  May 20, 2019 Dawn May

  The IBM i operating system is extensively instrumented for diagnostic purposes to help IBM resolve issues should they arise. Instrumenting your application for diagnostics is also possible in a manner very similar to what IBM has done in the operating system.

  STRTRC and the QTRC APIs

  The operating system includes a trace facility called QTRC. This trace facility is a set of APIs (QTRC APIs) that allow you to instrument your application to collect trace data.  This trace data can be whatever you may find helpful for debugging applications in a production environment, where using a debugger is …

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• IBM Bolsters RPG And COBOL Development

  May 13, 2019 Alex Woodie

  Amid the many and varied enhancements that IBM rolled out last month for its IBM i operating system was a collection of improvements for its core development tooling, including the Eclipse-based Rational Developer for i (RDi) as well as Rational Development Studio for i, which contains the RPG and COBOL compilers.

  Let’s start with the RPG and COBOL compilers in Rational Development Studio for i, since updates to these strategic pieces are more infrequent than the updates to RDi, which shares a common base with integrated development environments (IDEs) for other operating systems and therefore updated more frequently.

  The biggest …

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• How IBM i 7.4 Improves Security

  May 1, 2019 Alex Woodie

  The unveiling of Db2 Mirror may have gotten the lion’s share of attention with last week’s introduction of IBM i enhancements. But IBM has also given its customer base some significant security upgrades with the new releases of IBM i, including enhancements to the Authority Collection and support for the latest over-the-wire encryption protocol.

  “Our big things are around those two main themes – availability as well as security,” says Alison Butterill, IBM i product offering manager at IBM. “Those are the two main themes. But we have lots of things across the board.”

  IBM gave customers significant new user-focused …

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• IBM i DevOps Gets Simpler On Skytap Cloud

  February 25, 2019 Alex Woodie

  IBM i professionals who yearn for the administrative simplicity of Amazon Web Services will soon be rewarded when Skytap’s IBM i cloud becomes generally available next quarter. Among the IBM partners Skytap is tapping for the roll-out is Rocket Software, which is integrating the Aldon suite of lifecycle management tools to simplify DevOps in a potentially ground-breaking new way.

  Rocket Software is in the process of certifying its Aldon Lifecyle Manager for IBM i (LMi) software to run on Skytap‘s public cloud offering for IBM i. Late last year, Skytap, which has Amazon’s Jeff Bezos as a major investor …

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• Guru: Find The Needle In The Haystack With Watches

  February 25, 2019 Dawn May

  IBM i does a great job of logging information using messages. Messages are sent to message queues, the history log, as well as the job log. IBM i job logs can be very useful for identifying and resolving application issues. No other system has such a great logging facility for reviewing what happened in a job.

  What if you need to debug an intermittent application problem? What if the symptom is a message logged to the job log? And what if there are hundreds of jobs where this message could be sent? There are a variety of ways you can …

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