RPG Creeps Up Language Ranking . . . VAI Puts POS Chips on Verifone . . . OpenLegacy Signs Partner In Brazil
September 23, 2015 Alex Woodie
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RPG Creeps Up Language Ranking RPG has crept up in the TIOBE Index, a monthly ranking of the popularity of programming languages. Because RPG is still the primary language that’s used to develop applications on the IBM i platform, this is a good sign for IBM i job growth. The TIOBE Index for August 2015 had RPG as the 42nd most popular ranking with a rating of 0.273 percent. It was in a virtual tie with Haskell and just ahead of (Visual) FoxPro. The TIOBE Index for September 2015 had RPG creeping up three spots to number 39 with a 0.325 percent ranking, just behind Haskell and ahead of LabVIEW.
While the overall trend is good, RPG is still down significantly from 2011, when it made a surprising surge to number 18 with a 0.317 percent rating. In August 2014, RPG sat at number 47 with a .241 rating. COBOL meanwhile broke the top 20. It shot up from number 22 (and a 0.991 percent rating) on the TIOBE Index to number 20 in the September list with a 0.994 percent rating. It was a big move for COBOL, which languished at number 31 a year ago. RELATED STORIES IBM i Job Market: Not All Doom and Gloom The New Normal For The IBM i Job Market
VAI Puts POS Chips on Verifone VAI this month rolled out a new payment solution called S2K Point that will allow VAI customers to process electronic payments using the new so-called “chip and PIN” cards. The new solution is based largely on technology from payment giant Verifone that support the latest EMV (Europay, MasterCard, and Visa) standard, which refers to the new chip-enabled payment cards that millions of American consumers are now getting.
The Verifone platform, which also supports near-field communication (NFC) capabilities, is certified to work with the S2K point of sale (POS) software from VAI. The IBM i ERP developer from Ronkonkoma, New York, also sells S2K for Retail, which bundles POS, accounting, inventory management, customer relationship management, purchasing, warehouse management, and e-commerce functionality into one easy-to-use package. “Our partnership with Verifone enables VAI to deliver the S2K community with the upmost in credit card transaction processing security,” said Kevin Beasley, CIO of VAI. “With the highly anticipated EMV shift due to take effect in the United States on October 1, 2015, we are proud to offer S2K customers an EMV migration option.” RELATED STORIES VAI-VeriFone Partnership to Deliver Retail Application Integration Fireworks Company Retakes Control of its POS System
OpenLegacy Signs Partner In Brazil OpenLegacy, the provider of open source application modernization tools for IBM i and z/OS, has partnered with DTMSYST Consulting and IT Projects, a Brazilian IT services firm. “We are excited to work with DTMSYST and expand in Brazil,” said Rolin Zumaran, senior vice president of global sales at OpenLegacy. “The team’s knowledge of back end systems means they can plug in OpenLegacy immediately to fulfill their customers’ business needs.” DTMSYST likes what it found in OpenLegacy, says Décio Ronaldo Capovilla, technology director for the firm. “OpenLegacy is a very important tool for companies that want to deliver legacy information on web, mobile and even cloud quickly and more easily,” Capovilla says. “OpenLegacy provides what the IT market has always demanded: a low-cost tool based on open source technology that can deliver and integrate your legacy information rapidly, with minimum development effort, and no need for complex and expensive integration platforms,” he continues.” OpenLegacy has turned some heads since breaking into the IBM i application modernization market earlier this year. The company, which has headquarters in Israel and New Jersey, has attracted the attention of numerous customers and business partners with its unique twist on application modernization. The company’s flagship offering works by first analyzing the client’s legacy applications, whether it’s written in RPG, COBOL, PL1, or Natural, and creating a model of how it works. OpenLegacy then uses a wizard to automatically generate new interfaces for the app, which could be a new JavaScript/HTML5-based Web or mobile GUI, or a RESTful Web service. The software is all open source and extensible, which is a refreshing change of pace in this mostly proprietary corner of the IT market. “It’s not really exciting. It’s just plumbing,” OpenLegacy COO, Hans Otharsson told IT Jungle earlier this year. “We’re that last mile. We make sure you can get to that legacy system without a lot of heavy or costly middleware or without a lot of development time, or without having to look at it from a SOA architecture perspective.” RELATED STORIES What’s Legacy Now: WSDLs and Stored Procedures For OpenLegacy, Modernization Is All About the APIs OpenLegacy’s Modernization Approach Impresses New Partner Startup OpenLegacy Open Sources App Modernization Tool
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