• Guru: Fall Brings New RPG Features, Part 2

  January 11, 2021 Jon Paris

  In my previous tip I outlined some of the new features added to RPG with the Fall 2020 release. In this and the following tip I will be covering the features that I ran out of space for in that first one.

  This time I will cover the new FOR-EACH loop construct. I have wanted this in RPG ever since encountering it in PHP. Simply put, it automatically iterates through an array, “serving up” one element at a time. When I say “an array” I mean any kind of array, including data structure arrays, dynamic arrays and even the new …

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• Swedish Manufacturer Plans A New Path Forward

  December 2, 2020 Alex Woodie

  The Swedish manufacturing company Dahrentrad knew its S/36-era production planning solution was getting a bit long in the tooth. The question was, what should the company do about it? Migration and modernization were weighed as the two primary options, but which was the better path?

  A subsidiary of LWW Group, Dahrentrad specializes in producing copper and aluminum wiring used in electrical motors, pumps, transformers, and other industrial and automotive components. The 75-year-old company runs factories in Sweden, Germany, and Poland.

  The company relied on an old but reliable business application that utilized 5250 greenscreen interfaces, according to Mats Lidström, …

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• Remain Software Delivers Trio of Updates

  November 11, 2020 Alex Woodie

  Remain Software last week announced the delivery of new releases of three separate products, including TD/OMS, its lifecycle management tools for IBM i; Gravity, its workflow management system for multiple systems; API Studio, which helps IBM i shops develop and manage API connections to existing software.

  TD/OMS, which is Remain Software’s flagship offering, is an application lifecycle management (ALM) tool for IBM i developers. The core of the offering is the Object Management System (OMS), which guides users through the process of defining applications and their associated objects, while additional modules provide more targeted functionality for reporting, impact analysis, …

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• Grafana Provides a Visualization Option for IBM i Metrics

  November 4, 2020 Alex Woodie

  Today’s IT professional needs to stay informed on what’s happening across a slew of systems, including storage and CPU utilization. Having a platform-neutral system to visualize all these metrics is important, and one of the most widely used open source observability platforms today is a project called Grafana.

  Grafana was originally developed back in 2014 by a developer at Orbitz to be a front-end for Graphite, which another Orbitz developer created years earlier for capturing and storing time-series data generated by a wide array of servers, storage systems, applications, and other pieces of IT gear.

  Eventually, the creators decided that …

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• MAGiC to Host In-Person User Conference

  September 28, 2020 Alex Woodie

  If you are itching to get out of the house and complete some in-person IBM i education, then the upcoming MAGiC Conference might be for you. In early November, the group is planning to host a small get-together of no more than 40 socially distanced attendees in Virginia Beach, Virginia.

  The Annual MAGiC Conference, slated for November 9-11 at the Hilton Virginia Beach Oceanfront hotel, will be the first in-person IBM i conference since COVID-19 shelved the usual midrange happenings, says Laura Hamway, the leader of the Mid-Atlantic Group of IBM i Collaborators, also known as MAGiC.

  That’s a …

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• CNX Releases Beta of Valence 6.0

  September 2, 2020 Alex Woodie

  CNX last week announced the beta release of Valence 6.0, the newest version of its Web development framework and portal for IBM i. Valence 6.0 brings a whole new look and feel to Web applications created with Valence, as well as updates to administrative functions, the data access layer, and more.

  Valence is a set of tools for creating Web and mobile applications that run under IBM i’s Apache Web server and access existing RPG business logic. The product has several components, including a JavaScript library; a set of RPG procedures for integrating various JavaScript libraries (Ext JS, React, or …

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• Wire IoT Up To IBM i With Node-RED

  July 6, 2020 Alex Woodie

  The Internet of Things (IoT) brings a new way to think about our digital world. From sensors on a manufacturing line to Twitter messages from the other side of the world, the IoT brings it all together. And with Node-RED, a low-code framework that is available on IBM i, wiring up these data flows into useful applications is surprisingly easy.

  Created by IBM, Node-RED is a Node.JS-based framework for developing event-driven data applications, or “flows,” that deliver a data payload in the form of the JavaScript Object Notation (JSON) data standard, from a source to a destination. Node-RED flows …

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• An Investment In APIs For IBM i From Remain Software

  June 24, 2020 Alex Woodie

  Application programming interfaces (APIs) are not new. But API creation and consumption has surged in recent years as developers adopt more modular and extensible architectures for new and modernized applications. IBM i developers are getting into the act, too, which is leading vendors like Remain Software to cater to them with new tools, like its recently announced API Studio.

  A recent survey by API marketplace provider RapidAPI concluded that almost 67 percent of developers expect their API use to increase in 2020 compared to 2019. The company’s CEO, Iddo Gino, said the survey results confirm what the company has seen …

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• More Open Source Databases Coming To IBM i

  June 15, 2020 Alex Woodie

  IBM is in the process of bringing several new open source databases to the IBM i platform, including schema-less NoSQL databases as well traditional relational systems. Among the databases that Rochester is targeting are MongoDB, arguably the most popular NoSQL database and a favorite among Web and mobile developers, as well as PostgreSQL, one of the industry’s oldest and most widely used relational databases.

  Databases today almost are like programming languages, with developers mixing and matching databases to handle different functions, often within the same application. DB-Engines.com tracks more than 330 distinct databases, while there are somewhere around 700 programming …

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• A Simple Web Service Framework from Core-I Solutions

  May 20, 2020 Alex Woodie

  It can sometimes be difficult for IBM i shops to communicate with the outside world. RPG developers can get lost in the weeds of trying to figure out how to move data off IBM i to another platform. One potential solution is a new REST/Web services framework called Corei RSt that its creator says will simplify APIs.

  According to Core-I Solutions principal Jefferson Vaughn, a senior software engineer based in South Carolina, the Corei RSt framework streamlines the process of exposing IBM i data to business partners, customers, and outside developers who aren’t inside the company’s intranet.

  The framework leverages …

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