Last week the IBM i community got PHP 8.3, the newest version, via Seiden PHP+. While PHP 8.3 has valuable updates, PHP 8.0 and lower are no longer receiving even security fixes, increasing your risk of issues with security and certainly with your next security audit. Contact Alan for a free upgrade assessment. PHP 8.3’s new features include json_validate. You’ll find the full list of changes and supporting details at PHP.Watch.
On December 5, 2023, Alan joins fellow IBM Champions Koen Decorte and Charles Guarino at IBM France for a day-long seminar and networking event focused on IBM i modernization, AI, Business Intelligence (BI), and cyber resilience. Sponsored by IBM and CD-Invest, the seminar agenda balances educational sessions with opportunities to ask questions and have informal discussions with the presenters and fellow attendees.
If you’re up for a laugh today, check out RPG Rock — A Retrospective for IBM i Developers. In it, Paul Tuohy spins a tale of how Ted Holt and Alan Seiden roped in Steve Will, Barbara Morris, “roadie” Liam Allan, and many other IBM i-loving musicians to memorialize the life of an IBM i developer through music. You’ll find a few key segments linked below.
The Toronto User Group recently invited Alan to speak with them about how to implement secure, flexible APIs to connect IBM i applications to other systems. Using several real-world code examples written in various free tools and languages—including RPG, PHP, Python, and Node.js—Alan demonstrated how others send and receive data safely using their favorite language paired with IBM i business logic. This video contains the details.
Earlier this week we shared how one of our clients successfully transitioned the maintenance of an important System 36-era application from busy RPG developers to a younger web developer interested in learning RPG. The heart of their strategy? Converting their fixed-format RPG code to more modular RPG Free Form. At the same time, Susan Gantner was presenting a session on using free-form RPG with the clear message that moving to RPG Free Form is critical to bringing new talent to IBM i development.
Open source on IBM i is moving fast these days. Alan recently shared his favorite updates to IBM i open source—focusing on improved security, performance, and ease of programming—at a Summit Lunch & Learn hosted by Paul Tuohy.
Updated July 14, 2025 Our Twitter feeds recently rang out with this long-awaited news from Liam Allan: “Debugging ILE COBOL and RPGLE inside @code like it’s any other day! I’m pumped for this release #ibmi.” As reported by Alex Woodie in IBM i Debugger Comes to VS Code, IBM decoupled their RPG/COBOL debugger from RDi after years of encouragement from Liam. It’s now available as a Debug Service to the thousands of IBM i developers who have downloaded Visual Studio Code for IBM i.
Visual Studio Code for IBM i recently acquired a series of enhancements that greatly enrich the RPGLE developer experience. Known as Project Mode, the new features allow RPGLE developers to easily navigate their code — and understand it — all while editing remotely in the IDE. They can now find all references to definitions, find definitions of all references, and go to the implementation of export procedures without leaving the editor.
Open source continues to gain traction in IBM i shops, and for good reason. It excels at delivering new interfaces and functionality for RPG and COBOL applications, plus it broadens the talent pool for your development team.
UPDATE: CommunityPlus+ PHP is now known as Seiden PHP. The May 3, 2022 announcement of IBM i 7.5 and IBM i 7.4 TR6 gave us a lot to unpack. It rolled up many enhancements from previous TRs, then threw in a new subscription option for IBM i and a new modernization framework called Merlin. If you’re running Seiden’s CommunityPlus+ PHP, no worries. It’s compatible with IBM i 7.5. Here’s a collection of the articles and podcasts we found to be most informative for IBM i application development teams.