• It Is Time To Have A Group Chat About AI

  January 23, 2023 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  The first rule of any technology is that is can be used for good or evil, but generally it is used for something vaguely in between. The second rule, rarely used, is that some technologies need to be tightly controlled because of the global-scale damage they can cause. Nuclear fission and nuclear fusion come immediately to mind. And so does the special branch of machine learning called deep learning, which most people call AI training these days.

  I can’t remember precisely when I first started writing about AI training and the neural networks and frameworks underneath them, but I wrote …

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• 2023 IBM i Predictions, Part 1

  January 16, 2023 Alex Woodie

  What will happen in the IBM i world in 2023? Your guess is as good as ours, which is why we have corralled some of the most respected names in the industry to gaze into their crystal balls and give their prognostication for the year to come.

  Donnie MacColl, the senior director of technical support and GDPR data protection officer at Fortra (formerly HelpSystems), kicks off this year’s batch of predictions with an expectation of more automation, thanks to a lack of skilled employees.

  “Automated operations will accelerate along with migration to the cloud,” MacColl tells us. “Automation is key …

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• Loopback Hackathon Set for Next Week

  January 11, 2023 Alex Woodie

  The Loopback Hackathon organized by Common Europe last fall was such a hit that the organization is teaming up with COMMON North America for another hackathon next week. And like the previous hackathon, this one is also focused on using IBM i with Loopback, a popular Node.js framework for rapid development of REST APIs.

  Mark Irish, an advisory software developer with the IBM lab in Rochester, Minnesota, was tapped to lead the first Loopback Hackathon, which took place in the Netherlands. Spearheaded by Common Next Gen, a youth-oriented group that’s part of Common Europe, the event was a big …

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• 2022: An IBM i Year in Review, Part One

  December 14, 2022 Alex Woodie

  Well, it’s that time of year again – time to look back on the year and contemplate what happened. It was another eventful year in the midrange, with new servers and new operating systems. The IBM i user and vendor communities also worked to make it a rewarding year.

  2021 started innocently enough back in . . .

  January

  Cybercriminals earned a gazillion demerits for their early 2021 Christmas present to cybersecurity professionals: Log4j, the most critical security vulnerability to hit the IT world in years. With a perfect CVSS severity rating of 10, Log4j sent security professionals scrambling in …

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• The Steady Growth Of The Low Code Movement

  December 14, 2022 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  With IT talent in short supply and expensive as too much demand chases too little supply – a hard concept to get your brains around with over 42 million software developers working around the world creating and maintaining software that has an economic value in excess of $1 trillion a year – it is no surprise that some are looking to low code tools to help automate some aspects of their business.

  Low code is not just happening in the datacenters of small and medium businesses writing new applications to take on new problems and add new functionality to systems. …

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• Top 5 New IBM i Features to Check Out Now That Fall TRs Are GA

  December 7, 2022 Alex Woodie

  All of the new features that IBM unveiled earlier this fall with the Technology Refreshes for IBM i 7.4 and 7.5 (as well as another stealth “non-TR” TR for 7.3) are now generally available. Some of them shipped before December 2, but pretty much all of them are now GA. With so much enterprise computing goodness ready to download, what will you adopt first?

  We know it’s not Christmas yet. But with so many new features, it can be hard to figure out what to do first. While everybody has their own computing priorities, we have our own ideas for …

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• Thoroughly Modern: A Swiss Army Knife For IBM i Developers

  December 5, 2022 Robert Arce

  Our strength as developers and programmers lies not only in the code we write, but also in the tools we choose to surround ourselves with. The right tools are often the determining factor in how productive, efficient and accurate we can be – especially when working with large applications that we didn’t even write.

  Long gone are the days of just managing a handful of programs, technologies, languages or databases, and relying on tribal knowledge to make critical business decisions isn’t just risky, it’s irresponsible. Especially when more and more experienced IBM i (AS/400) developers are changing jobs or retiring …

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• Data Is Streaming Into The Cloud, Including From IBM i

  November 14, 2022 Alex Woodie

  We are in the midst of a vast migration of data into public clouds, as companies seek to leverage technological innovation occurring in the cloud for competitive advantage. While there are no IBM i runtimes in the public cloud yet, IBM i shops are still getting value by moving their valuable Db2 for i data into the cloud, often using streaming technologies and tools like Apache Kafka and Apache Camel, as well as an updated ETL offering from IBM.

  It is tough to understate the magnitude of the transition to the public cloud is having on the $4 trillion IT …

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• Momentum Builds For Code For IBM i

  November 7, 2022 Alex Woodie

  Energy and excitement are building in the IBM i development community thanks to Code for IBM i, the VS Code extension that enables users to write and edit RPG and COBOL code in a Web browser. Spearheaded by Liam Allan, who now works for IBM, the lightweight alternative to RDi is approaching critical mass among IBM i developers desperate for something new.

  For many years, IBM i shops had few options available to them when it comes to developing ILE applications for IBM i. IBM’s default recommendation was Rational Developer for i, the Java-based integrated development environment (IDE) that …

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• What’s The Best Web Language For IBM i?

  October 31, 2022 Alex Woodie

  What’s the best language for developing Web applications on IBM i – Python, PHP, or Node.js? That’s the loaded question recently posed by Mike Pavlak, who has been sailing IBM i’s open source waters for nearly two decades. As Pavlak’s presentation at the recent COMMON NAViGATE conference showed, the answer might surprise you.

  Initially, Pavlak aimed to fight for Python in his “Web Language Shootout” session at COMMON’s NAViGATE conference, which was held in St. Louis, Missouri, last month, while his Perforce Software, colleague, Guido Faecke, argued for PHP and Liam Allan, who recently joined IBM, backed …

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