• S4i Systems Embraces Open Source Project

  April 17, 2017 Dan Burger

  Open source development on IBM i bodes well for the platform and all those who look to the future as well as recognizing the value of the past. RPG development isn’t threatened by open source options. It’s stimulated by open source. The modernization of RPG, C, or COBOL investments gets a boost from open source. There are people writing applications on IBM i that would not be within shouting distance of the platform if open source language options were not available.

  When Web services, mobile applications and other Web technologies become more closely aligned with i, the community benefits. The …

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• SQL To The Rescue

  April 10, 2017 Bob Cozzi

  Since the early 1990s, developers have been using SQL embedded in RPG as a way to retrieve just the right data for the task at hand. Certainly it was at least a decade before it became commonplace to see SQL embedded in RPG, but now, 15 years later, it is in fact the go-to method for data access, or at least you can see it from here.

  I was an early adopter of SQL, but an off-again, on-again user of embedded SQL. Originally, I felt the first format RPG with quasi-free format SQL (and all those plus signs to continue …

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• Guru: MiWorkplace As An Alternative To SEU

  March 13, 2017 Jon Paris

  From time to time somebody will recommend an application to me and it sounds really useful – until I discover that it is Windows Only. Whenever that happens I usually go to one of the Alternative To websites, such as AlternativeTo.net, to see what I can find.

  Recently I was asked if there were any alternatives to SEU by a programmer who wanted to use fully free RPG and was tired of the green screen blobs all over his code. (See the example below if you don’t know what I mean by this.) This was a topic that …

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• RPG Investment Advice For Long Term Goals

  March 13, 2017 Dan Burger

  RPG programming remains a hugely important skill in the IBM Power Systems niche where the IBM i lives. It shares that space with other languages such as Java, PHP, a few fourth-generation options and a host of open source options. More than once in its long life, RPG has been declared dead.

  Like an untended plant, some IBM i shops have let RPG die. It lingers on with little or no nourishment in other organizations. But it’s also doing very well as a modern language when in the hands of skilled programmers. Who are the skilled programmers and what are …

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• The Missing RPG OA Puzzle Piece

  March 6, 2017 Dan Burger

  RPG Open Access is a technology that was introduced with much fanfare with the IBM i 7.1 release of the operating system. That was in 2010. A handful of software vendors showed what it could do by using it in their application modernization tool kits as a means to get beyond screen-scraping and actually control the user interface.

  Now RPG OA is seven years old and not a lot has changed. A few more vendors have incorporated it as a method for creating user interfaces. The potential for RPG OA is mostly unrealized and it remains unrecognized by the majority …

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• Guru: The PHP Path To Victory, Part 1

  March 6, 2017 Chris Ringer

  If you read my two previous PHP articles, you may be tempted to make the leap to use PHP on your IBM i. But you may also have reservations because how in the world will you technically support those apps post implementation?

  This article discusses the path a PHP request takes as it travels through various subsystems up to your RPG code and how to do basic troubleshooting if something goes wrong.

  Tag Team Match

  Often greatness is achieved with the help of someone else. Michael Jordan had Scottie Pippen. Babe Ruth had Lou Gehrig. And Abbott had Costello. In …

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• IBM i Community To Get Closer Look At Watson

  February 27, 2017 Dan Burger

  The cogs in cognitive are turning. And there are indications that IBM is ready to go beyond the story of how it works to stories about it is working. The messengers remain somewhat tight lipped, but we can expect cognitive to be a celebrated technology at the COMMON conference in early May.

  Watson, the face of IBM cognitive computing, is highly recognizable. Bluemix, IBM’s cloud platform for building, running, and managing apps and services, including Watson, is getting more attention. And the number of APIs that pull this together with integration points for all platforms, including IBM i, …

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• What’s Wrong With Modern RPG?

  February 27, 2017 Dan Burger

  IBM continues to enhance RPG. If it wasn’t being improved on a regular basis, there would be cause for concern, but some people find cause for concern in everything. Satisfaction is on the other side of the fence, even after they’ve crossed the fence. That’s not an endorsement for “If you don’t have anything nice to say, don’t say anything at all.” There’s always room for constructive criticism and honest assessments of the circumstances.

  That brings us to the RPG enhancements in the recently announced Technology Refresh identified as IBM i 7.2 TR 6 and IBM i 7.3 TR …

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• Handling Constraints Revisited

  March 31, 2015 Paul Tuohy

  I recently had an email from Doug, who was making use of some code I had published way back in February 2010 in my article Handling Constraint Violations in RPG. The article discussed how to trap a constraint violation caused by a WRITE/UPDATE/DELETE operation and, more importantly, how to determine the name of the constraint that caused the violation. Doug had come up with an instance where my code was not working! After going through the usual stages of denial, anger, and some expensive therapy, I read the rest of the email. Doug’s code worked fine with an RPG

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• Handling Constraint Violations in RPG

  February 17, 2010 Paul Tuohy

  Constraints have been around for a long time but have not quite made it into every programmer’s tool kit. This is partly explained by the fact that implementing constraints in an existing application can be tricky–but it doesn’t explain why constraints are not used extensively in new applications. On a side note, the lack of constraints on a database is one of the reasons I have heard why data should be moved/copied from the i to other database servers, such as SQL server and Oracle, for such things as data warehousing. To a “pure database person,” a lack of constraints

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