• ILEditor2: Satisfying The Need For Development Speed

  April 28, 2021 Alex Woodie

  Liam Allan doesn’t like anything to slow him down. “I’m impatient,” says the young IBM i phenom. So when he’s writing RPG or COBOL, the code editor had best keep up with him. That’s a problem using something like Rational Developer for IBM i (RDi), which Allan doesn’t particularly care for. And that is one of the primary reasons why Allan developed ILEditor, which is now in its second incarnation as ILEditor 2.

  Just over a year ago, Allan and his business partner, Connor Holyday, shipped the first release of ILEditor 2. The pair had just completed an extensive …

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• Need An RPG Programmer? Nalashaa May Have You Covered

  April 19, 2021 Alex Woodie

  Companies that are having trouble finding RPG programmers to maintain IBM i applications may be interested in the services of Nalashaa Solutions, an IT services company that has nearly 200 RPG programmers at its disposal. In addition to expertise in healthcare, financial services, and manufacturing/distribution industries, the New Jersey-based company can help with application modernization, code documentation, and migration to the cloud, too.

  The RPG coder supply chain is an oft-discussed topic that incites passion in many people. In some parts of the country and the world, companies have no problem finding RPG programmers to hire. In other locales, you …

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• Big Blue Unveils Spring 2021 IBM i Technology Refreshes

  April 12, 2021 Alex Woodie

  IBM tomorrow will announce the latest round of Technology Refreshes (TRs) for the current versions of the operating systems. With IBM i 7.4 TR4 and 7.3 TR10, IBM is focusing its efforts on extending automation across various components of the operating system, including the database, security, and high availability. But a surprise also awaits IBM i enthusiasts who are visually inclined.

  IBM gave IT Jungle a preview of the announcements that will go public tomorrow, and (very kindly) gave us permission to cover them in today’s issue of The Four Hundred. That means that the announcement materials will not …

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• Guru: Web Services, DATA-INTO and DATA-GEN, Part 2

  April 12, 2021 Jon Paris

  In Part 1 of this series I discussed the use of DATA-GEN and DATA-INTO to create “blog entries” via a web service. This time I am going to focus on using the GET HTTP method to retrieve blog entries. As you will see the basic process is very similar.

  I am going to start by retrieving a single blog post, but rather than retrieve all of the data associated with the post I will show you how to restrict processing to specific elements. I will then move on to look at two approaches to processing multiple posts. The first processes …

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• When Cloud Meets DevOps on IBM i

  April 7, 2021 Alex Woodie

  We’re witnessing multiple macro trends play out in the IT industry, with the rise of cloud computing and managed services being one of the most compelling storylines in 2021. How software is developed is changing too, with DevOps tools and agile methodologies rapidly becoming the norm. When these two trends converge in our little neck of the woods, it can leave IBM i customers wondering where to go. With their recently formed partnership, ARCAD Software and Connectria have mapped out one path.

  A decade ago, companies were still unsure of the cloud. They would dabble with adding development, test, and …

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• IBM Completes Migration of Knowledge Center to IBM Documentation

  April 7, 2021 Alex Woodie

  For years, the IBM Knowledge Center has been the go-to place to get technical information about how things work in IBM i. Got a question about RPG opcodes or ALLOBJ authority? The Knowledge Center was the place for you. As part of its broader overhaul of its online resources and properties, IBM recently completed the migration of its Knowledge Center to the new site, called IBM Documentation.

  IBM i professionals can find all of the content they have grown accustomed to finding at the Knowledge Center on the new IBM Documentation site, which can be found at www.ibm.com/docs/en. There …

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• Guru: Web Services, DATA-INTO and DATA-GEN, Part 1

  April 5, 2021 Jon Paris

  Many of the “Can you help me with. . . ” communications that cross my desk these days include reference to JSON. Sometimes the questioner is receiving JSON in a file, or has to retrieve it from a web service, or needs to generate JSON in response to a query. While there are many ways to handle these requirements, RPG’s built-in DATA-INTO and DATA-GEN can do a lot of the heavy lifting for you and are quite simple once you understand the basics.

  In this series of tips, I am going to start with a basic example that uses both …

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• It’s Not Always Sunny in ERP Land

  March 31, 2021 Alex Woodie

  Enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems remain central to company operations. The expansive application suites are heavily relied upon to automate the core business processes that businesses rely on. However, they’re notoriously difficult to implement, and they do not always do what they’re supposed to. And according to a recent survey, they’re often lousy when it comes to providing a return on investment.

  For its Technology Trends 2021 study, Computer Economics polled nearly 200 IT professionals to gauge what types of technologies they’re using, and whether they’re getting a good ROI out of them. When the results were tallied, ERP came …

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• Guru: Stub Testing And SQL

  March 29, 2021 Ted Holt

  A stub program is a program that does nothing but stand in as a place holder for a real program, which may or may not exist yet. I have used them for years to help me test program changes. There are also stub subroutines, stub subprocedures, etc. What I want to talk about today is how to use a similar concept for SQL queries.

  You can use your favorite search engine to learn about stubs, but I’ll give you an example to increase the chances that you’ll know what I’m talking about. Let’s say that I am modifying a CL …

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• OpenShift Provides One Path To IBM i Modernization

  March 29, 2021 Alex Woodie

  The crown jewel in IBM’s $34 billion acquisition of Red Hat arguably is OpenShift, which is a Kubernetes-based container management system for running “cloud-native” applications. While it’s unlikely OpenShift will ever integrate directly with IBM i and its applications, IBM has high hopes the software will help usher in a new wave of application modernization and innovation among IBM i customers.

  IBM Power engineer Joe Cropper laid out the case for IBM i shops to get going with OpenShift two weeks ago during the IBM i Futures conference, which was hosted by COMMON. Cropper, you will remember, made a …

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