• 2021 Predictions for IBM i, Part 1

  January 13, 2021 Alex Woodie

  With an eventful 2020 thankfully in the rearview mirror, it’s time to start thinking about what 2021 might have in store for us. The IBM i community, like most of the world, could use a little bit of hope at the moment. We asked IBM i community leaders to deliver predictions, and they responded.

  Liam Allan, who is a consultant at Seiden Group and the creator of ILE Editor, has a couple of predictions for IT Jungle.

  “My focus is mainly software. I do still predict Node.js gaining traction on IBM i,” Allan writes. “The tooling is really …

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• Choosing The Language To Transform Your Applications

  October 19, 2020 Michael Killian

  Most of our customers are comfortable with RPG since it is the predominant language on the IBM i, and most are familiar with Java and .NET since those languages have been around for two to three decades. But many are not as familiar with Node.js.

  There are a lot of great resources available regarding Node.js, so I thought amalgamating that information into one concise article for ease of reference might be a better use of your time. There are so many resources out there to give context and meaning to Node.js, so I have put together a list of the …

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• New Option Emerges for Refactoring IBM i Apps

  August 19, 2020 Alex Woodie

  IBM i shops that want to refactor their RPG and COBOL applications into different languages have a new option available to them. In late June, Astadia and Blu Age announced they’re working together on a new service that automates the conversion of customers’ older apps into Java and .NET code that can run on X86 systems in your basement or the cloud.

  Based in Boston, Massachusetts, Astadia claims to have completed more than 200 mainframe migrations and more than 100 mainframe modernization projects over about two-and-a-half decades. The company has modernized millions of lines of COBOL code running on mainframes …

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• Getting Out Of The Catch-22 Of Application Transformation

  August 3, 2020 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  If starting up a business is hard, maintaining that business can be even more difficult. Conditions and tastes change over time, and applications that drive the business can feel the strain.

  Upper management and IT organizations might have the skills to keep business applications going and make modest changes here and there, or perhaps add a new product line or two. But they usually do not have the time or people to do anything too radical, such as modernizing and transforming those applications to work in completely new ways. This is where bringing in a product and services partner comes …

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• How GraphQL Can Improve IBM i APIs

  March 9, 2020 Alex Woodie

  IBM i shops are embracing APIs as a method for accessing data and programs, just like the wider IT world. As RESTful Web services overtook SOAP-based ones in popularity, IBM i shops moved with them. Now a new approach to Web services, dubbed GraphQL, is gaining traction in the wider IT world, and leading IBM i developers are right there again.

  GraphQL, if you’re not familiar, is a relatively new language and runtime for exposing and consuming APIs. The software, which was originally developed in 2015 by Facebook to streamline delivery of content in complex environments, essentially provides an abstraction …

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• Thoroughly Modern: Taking The Pulse Of IBM i Developers

  January 22, 2020 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  It takes someone who has experience in application development to create and sell tools that help make a developer’s job easier. We think about the tool creators, but when it comes to getting people to adopt a new technology, the technical sales team at any software company is the bridge that connects developers of tools to the developer of applications who can be helped by those tools. In this edition of Thoroughly Modern, we are talking with Stephen Flaherty, a technical engineer at Fresche Solutions, about what IBM i developers are thinking about and doing today.

  Timothy Prickett Morgan: …

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• Sometimes Even DIYers Need A Little Help

  October 7, 2019 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  If there ever was a crowd that liked to do it themselves, it is the IBM midrange. Well, probably more like half to two-thirds of the IBM midrange. But you know what I mean.

  These companies started programming way back in the 1970s with one of Big Blue’s System/3 or System 32, or System/34 machines, and moved on to the System/38 or the System/36. The former launched in 1978, a decade after the System/3 that started it all in Rochester, Minnesota, and the latter came out in 1983, five years before the AS/400. The machines had sophisticated batch and interactive …

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• IBM i Startup Tackles “Awkward” Git Integration

  September 30, 2019 Alex Woodie

  If you have ever felt that working with Git on the IBM i platform was a little awkward and could be refined to fit your native IBM i development experience on RDi or SEU just a bit better, then you might be interested in learning about a new utility called iForGit that was recently released by IBM midrange veteran Richard Schoen and his new startup, MobiGoGo.

  Git came to the IBM i three years ago, and there’s no denying that it has been a hit. Since Linux developer Linus Torvalds released it nearly a decade-and-a-half ago, the open source …

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• ARCAD Unveils GUI Modernization Tool

  September 25, 2019 Alex Woodie

  ARCAD Software is getting deeper into the application modernization business with the launch of iNow, a new tool designed to help IBM i users create compelling graphical user interfaces (GUI) that run across Windows, Web, and mobile form factors. The new offering, which is based on Microsoft .NET and utilizes Remote Desktop Protocol (RDP) technology, is being sold as part of a new suite called ARCAD for IBM i Modernization.

  IBM i shops have been adapting their applications to Windows interfaces for the better part of 30 years, to the Web for about 20 years, and to mobile interfaces for …

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• Talking Digital Transformation With The New And Prior CEO

  September 9, 2019 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Here is a situation that each and every IT manager and chief information officer has experienced and will continue to experience: Having a very long conversation with the president or chief executive officer of their company about how to engage in or continue with digital transformation and the application and database modernization that this entails. And sometimes, that conversation will happen as a new person takes the helm of the company.

  That’s precisely what we did this week, but with a twist or two. We are not an IT manager or CIO, but rather an observer in the boardrooms of …

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