• IBM i PTF Guide, Volume 21, Number 13

  April 3, 2019 Doug Bidwell

  This week in the IBM i PTF Guide, we are obsessing about security. There is a security bulletin out that explains that there are multiple vulnerabilities in IBM Java SDK and IBM Java Runtime that affect IBM i. There is consequently a new Java Group for all three releases – IBM i 7.1, IBM i 7.2, and IBM i 7.3. See this link for further details.

  There is also a separate security bulletin, CVE-2018-14647, relating to Python that affects IBM i, and this affects all three currently supported releases as well. See this link for the scoop. For Python 2.7 …

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• The Search For Intelligent Life Apparently Is Over

  April 1, 2019 Orwell

  Extraterrestrials from the planet Voltak in the constellation Dithmaar today shared conclusions about their recently completed mission to IS Manager Gerald Hugh’s well-run computer department located on the second floor of Statewide Tire & Rim in beautiful East Plymouth, South Dakota.

  “Thank you, Earthlings, for allowing us to examine your planet for the past two years, and in particular, we’d like to give a big shout out to Gerald Hugh’s for letting us monitor his extremely well-run information services department,” tweeted Commander Rahnzo Maxdruv of the 17th Expeditionary Fleet of Voltak Imperial Starship Command from his work account, @alienzforlife.

  “When …

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• What New Language Will IBM i Support Next?

  March 27, 2019 Alex Woodie

  The prospect of a new language coming to a platform is always reason for excitement. New languages bring new capabilities, or at least faster ways to tap into existing capabilities. The question for those living and working on the IBM i platform is what language will come next?

  RPG remains the go-to language used by the vast majority developers on the IBM i platforms. According to the 2019 survey by HelpSystems, 84 percent of coders on the box use RPG. COBOL, RPG’s partner in legacy crime, is also supported in the Rational Development for IBM i RDi, along with …

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• A HATS For Many Occasions

  March 25, 2019 Alex Woodie

  IBM gives customers plenty of options when it comes to its Rational Host Access Transformation software, including several modes of operation, different runtime options, and support for different operating systems in screen modernization engagements. With last week’s launch of HATS version 9.7, the development and deployment options got even wider.

  Regardless of which downstream options a HATS customer ultimately chooses, it all starts out basically the same on the front side of the sausage machine: Customers come to HATS because they have a 5250 (or 3270 or VT100) application that they want to transform, but they don’t want to go …

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• Building A Positive Culture of Learning On IBM i

  February 18, 2019 Alex Woodie

  How do you motivate IBM i programmers to keep learning new technologies, long after they have mastered the RPG skills they use the most? There’s no simple answer to that question, which was the topic of a recent conversation IT Jungle had with PHP on IBM i guru Alan Seiden and Heidi Schmidt, the head of PKS Software.

  IBM i shops face several interrelated problems when it comes to their personnel, which traditionally is one of the biggest line items in the IT budget. These challenges include: the aging of IBM i professionals; the retirements of baby boomer-aged personnel; the …

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• Settling In With IBM i For The Long Haul

  February 11, 2019 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  If nothing else, the IBM i platform has exhibited extraordinary longevity. One might even say legendary longevity, if you want to take its history all the way back to the System/3 minicomputer from 1969. This is the real starting point in the AS/400 family tree and this is when Big Blue, for very sound legal and technical and marketing reasons, decided to fork its products to address the unique needs of large enterprises (with the System/360 mainframe and its follow-ons) and small and medium businesses (starting with the System/3 and moving on through the System/34, System/32, System/38, and System/36 in …

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• More IBM i Predictions For 2019

  February 6, 2019 Alex Woodie

  We kicked off our 2019 soothsaying last week with predictions from IBM i leaders on what the New Year will bring. We keep the ball rolling this week with another batch of predictions from our friends around the IBM i community.

  According to Alison Butterill, IBM‘s the program director for offering management for IBM i, the platform will build off the momentum generated with last year’s 30th anniversary celebrant.

  “The excitement begun in 2018 as we highlighted client innovation around the world will continue into 2019,” Butterill says. “The momentum continues to grow as clients are looking at ways …

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• IBM i Has Been Getting With The Program For Years

  February 4, 2019 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  There are many things that one could constructively criticize IBM about when it comes to the Power Systems platform running the IBM i operating system. But, in recent years at least, one of those things would not be – and could not be – that the company has not done enough to embrace the most important elements of the modern programming toolbox.

  In fact, the company has done and increasingly good job of embracing and extending the compilers, interpreters, frameworks, and models of the programming languages that have gone mainstream since Java first took the stage at the beginning of …

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• One Repository To Rule The Source – And Object – Code

  February 4, 2019 Floyd Del Muro

  (Sponsored Content) The concept of a single repository for source is not necessarily a new one. When I interviewed with ARCAD back in 2011, I did so at the at the Rational conference called Innovate in Orlando. The research and development team and our chief technology officer were already in dialogue with IBM to resell ARCAD technology alongside its Rational development suite, adding power to Rational Team Concert that development organizations could effectively have a similar repository for IBM i and open source applications.

  At the time, RTC supported the open source world very well, just like Git …

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• Guru: Create A UDTF Wrapper For A Stored Procedure Result Set

  February 4, 2019 Michael Sansoterra

  In the tip, Arranging Query Logic in DB2 for i Routines, I addressed a reader’s question about how to create a user-defined table function (UDTF) in DB2 for i that would return the same result set as an existing stored procedure. The purpose of having the UDTF would be to do additional processing on a result set, such as joining the result set with another query or dumping the result set to a temporary table for analysis. To accomplish this, I suggested moving the stored procedure query logic into a UDTF and then replace the query within the stored …

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