• Serving Up Fast, Fresche Interfaces for IBM i

  October 31, 2018 Alex Woodie

  “Time is money,” as Benjamin Franklin once said. With enough of either, IBM i shops could accomplish all of their modernization goals. But of course, both time and money are limited, which is why tactical tools like the Presto modernization tool from Fresche are gaining traction.

  Fresche’s Presto is an IBM i modernization tool that takes 5250 output from applications and converts it on the fly into HTML that can be rendered in a standard Web browser. The software can also work with the RPG Open Access handler from IBM to power GUIs that have RPG-based back ends but …

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• Guru: Using SQL With Multi-Membered Files

  October 29, 2018 Mike Larsen

  Recently I worked on a process that required me to update records in a file based on certain criteria. Sounds like a common request, right? Well, there was a twist. The file had multiple members and the update needed to consider all of them. Suddenly, a “simple” request became a bit more challenging.

  I knew of a few ways to work with multi-membered files, but I like to lay out all the options before deciding on a game plan. One method I considered was to perform an override of the file (OVRDBF command). That would certainly work, although I have …

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• PASE Versus ILE: Which Is Best For Open Source?

  October 22, 2018 Alex Woodie

  Open source has emerged as a driver of innovation in the past 20 years, and has greatly accelerated technological innovation. The proprietary IBM i platform has also benefited from this trend, thanks in large part to the capability to run Linux applications in the PASE runtime. But some members of the IBM i community are concerned that the fruits of the open source innovation have not tasted quite as sweet as they do on other platforms.

  Linux was the original breakout star in open source software, and so it should be no surprise that the vast majority of software developed …

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• ARCAD Debuts RPG Code Checker

  October 3, 2018 Alex Woodie

  If you write RPG, or know somebody who does, then you realize that mistakes can and will happen. However, beyond the obvious syntax errors, which should be detected immediately by the code editor, are instances where the code is sloppy or just poorly written. Those are the instances where ARCAD Software hopes to help with its new CodeChecker offering.

  ARCAD-CodeChecker, as the product is officially called, does just that: Detect poor quality RPG code before it makes it into production. If you’ve coded a bug into the program, made a design error, or taken 1,000 lines to write something that …

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• Guru: Phonetic Functions In SQL, Part 1

  September 17, 2018 Paul Tuohy

  In my next two articles I am going to discuss the use of phonetic functions in SQL. You can use phonetic functions to select or order rows based on the phonetic sound of a string as opposed to the actual characters in the string. The obvious use of phonetic functions is with names, but they can be used with any string columns.

  I must admit that this touches on one of my pet peeves — the spelling of my surname. I have lost count of the number of times I have had to spell my name two, three, or four …

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• Guru: Data-Centrism, Step Zero

  September 10, 2018 Ted Holt

  I hear a lot these days about the need for data-centric information systems. That is as it should be. The proper way to support an organization is to remove logic from application programs and put it into the database through such devices as constraints and triggers. However, before many shops can take the first step in that direction, they need to take what I call step zero.

  Step zero in data-centric computing is to remove hard-coded data values from programs and put them into the database. Just as the database manager should enforce business rules (e.g. we don’t ship to …

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• Guru: RPG Sorting and Searching, A 7.2 Update

  September 5, 2018 Susan Gantner

  Author’s Note: This is the second update I’ve done to a tip I originally wrote back in 2008. In 2010, I updated the code to use SORTA with array data structures. Here in 2018 I’m updating it once more — this time to use free-form declarations in place of the D specs, including a more obvious way to code the nested data structure used in some of the examples and references to more recent tips for handling very large arrays. The 2010 version was entitled “. . . A 7.1 Update.” I’ve renamed this one as “. . . A …

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• Guru: Handling Constraint Violations In RPG

  September 5, 2018 Paul Tuohy

  Author’s Note: The contents of this article were originally published as two separate articles – Handling Constraint Violations in RPG and Handling Constraints Revisited. The content of the article has been updated for free form RPG and some of the coding enhancements that have been introduced, into RPG, since 2009.

  Constraints have been around for a long time but apparently 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 …

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• Guru: Getting the Message, Part 2

  August 29, 2018 Paul Tuohy

  Author’s Note: This article was originally published in October 2009. Since then, I have worked on many modernization projects with many clients and, in every one of those projects, we have used some form of the contents of this (and the following) article. The content of the article has been updated for free-form RPG and some of the coding enhancements that have been introduced, into RPG, since 2009. The original articles also showed examples of direct calls to RPG subprocedures from PHP. Given that we now have many languages (Node.js, Python etc.) that interact with RPG, I changed the mechanism …

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• Guru: Make It Easy On Someone Else

  August 20, 2018 Ted Holt

  “Make it easy on yourself,” warbled Dionne Warwick when I was just a pup. That may be good advice when severing a romantic relationship, but not when programming computers. Instead of making it easy on ourselves, we who develop and support applications need to make it easy on the people we serve.

  Recently I worked on a project in which users had to enter time values into various Web pages. The original specifications stated that users would enter time values in a format we commonly use in the United States: two-digit hour, a colon, two-digit minute, a space, …

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