• Seiden Group Offers PHP Migration Service

  May 27, 2020 Alex Woodie

  Change is in the air when it comes to PHP on IBM i. The free Zend distribution of PHP that has been adopted by thousands of IBM i shops over the years is going away, and it’s being replaced by a new community distribution that’s installed via RPM. But how can you move existing PHP apps to the new environment? Seiden Group has a potential solution.

  As we told you last week, the Zend Server Basic environment will stop being offered by Perforce (the company that now owns Zend Technology) or distributed with the IBM i operating system on …

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• Welcome To The ‘Riehl’ World: Live, Hands-On IBM i Training

  May 18, 2020 Alex Woodie

  IBM i shops don’t have a ton of options available when it comes to online IBM i education these days. If you’re in the market to improve your skills, one of the outfits that should be on your shortlist is The 400 School, which is one of the few places left that offers hands-on IBM i education, according to the company’s founder and president, Dan Riehl.

  Riehl has had the kind of IBM midrange career that younger folks arriving on the platform today can only dream of. He has founded companies, written books, worked as a security consultant and …

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• As I See It: COBOL In The Time Of COVID

  May 11, 2020 Victor Rozek

  If you are retired, or currently not working, but happen to have outdated IT skills and want to Make America Great Again by going back to work and risking your life for the economy, your government has a deal for you.

  Apparently, one of the inadvertent side effects of the current pandemic was to expose just how awful and antiquated the government’s computer systems are. In a country otherwise blessed with leading-edge innovation and unparalleled high-tech capability, COBOL is still being used – to a lesser or greater degree – to run the unemployment insurance programs in all but 16 …

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• ILEditor 2 Gives IBM i Shops A New Development Option

  May 6, 2020 Alex Woodie

  Liam Allan recently unveiled ILEditor 2, a new integrated development environment (IDE) for IBM i. The new IDE sports a fresher look and better performance compared to the first version of ILEditor, as well as an extensible plug-in system, which should also deliver better code coverage.

  For many years, members of the IBM i community have expressed frustration by the high price, size, and performance of Rational Developer for i (RDi), which is IBM’s flagship development tool for the IBM i community. While the IDE’s performance has improved in recent years, members of the community still bemoan the …

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• COVID-19 Response: Manta Cuts Training Prices, Offers Freebies

  April 20, 2020 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Everybody is doing their part to try to cushion the blow of the coronavirus outbreak and also to stay in business themselves. It’s a delicate balance, and one that we are all trying to manage.

  Manta Technologies, which has been providing IBM i training for nearly the past three decades and online training for other platforms for more than four decades now, is doing its part. For nearly 20 years now, Manta’s library of more than 130 IBM i courses has been available online, and people all over the world use it to brush up on existing skills and …

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• Guru: Copy From Stream File FMTOPT(*NOCHK)

  April 13, 2020 Bob Cozzi

  Using SQL frequently, as I do, I tend to look for solutions to problems that can be resolved using the database language (i.e., SQL). Sometimes I have to invent a missing piece of the puzzle. Often that entails writing a User-Defined Function (UDF) for use in SQL, but sometimes a CL command is the better choice.

  Recently I had a situation where what the client calls an “EDI File” was being downloaded using sftp on the IBM server running i. This file is created at a vendor that runs IBM mainframes (an actual mainframe by the way) and the file …

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• Thoroughly Modern: Giving IBM i Developers A Helping Hand

  March 9, 2020 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  The good thing about the Moore’s Law improvements in compute, storage, and networking capacity is that the cost of a complete IT system more accurately reflects where the real value of that system was always really derived.

  In decades gone by, the AS/400 hardware cost represented somewhere on the order of 85 percent of the cost of a server and its storage and the OS/400 systems software accounted for the remaining 15 percent or so. Over time, the hardware costs have dropped to about a third of the overall system cost as systems have also gotten incredibly more powerful. But …

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• Guru Classic: Overlaid Packed Data In Data Structures

  March 4, 2020 Jon Paris

  When I re-read this tip while looking for a “Classic” candidate, I was reminded that the underlying issue it addresses, namely how data is actually stored in an RPG program, is one that many RPG programmers don’t really have a firm grip on. That alone made it a good candidate. But perhaps even more important is demonstrating this topic to the many new programmers coming onto the platform. Unlike those of us who started off with assembly languages, C, RPG, or COBOL, modern programmers trained in C#, Python, or PHP have never had any need to understand the mechanics of …

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• New IBM Champions Reflect on Their Journeys

  February 26, 2020 Alex Woodie

  IBM has rolled out its new list of Champions for Power, and on the list are eight men from the IBM i community who have been named Champions for the first time. Among the honorees is the Four Hundred Guru himself, Ted Holt.

  Ted Holt: IT Jungle guru and senior software developer at Profound Logic

  

  Holt’s day job is working as a senior software developer for Profound Logic. But at night he becomes the IT Jungle’s Guru, dispensing IBM i code and snippets of hard-won wisdom as a senior technical editor of The Four Hundred. He also tweets from …

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• 2019: An IBM i Year To Review

  December 16, 2019 Alex Woodie

  And. . . stop! Put down your pencils, class. The test is over. We have made it through another year. Well, okay, we have almost made it through most of this year. But with just two weeks left, now is the time to wrap it all up and revisit the biggest IBM i stories to make news in the year that was 2019.

  It all started back in January, when…

  IBM jacked up the prices on IBM Lab Services engagements by more than 10 percent. Whereas it used to cost $3,125 per day to have the benefit of an IBM …

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