IBM i computer, formerly named AS/400, iSeries, i5
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.
IBM-wise, I’m a switch hitter. I’ve worked on both IBM i and IBM z/OS (as well as IBM z/VM, but that’s another story).
IBM i and z/OS have identical missions of reliable, unimpeachable data center operations. The two differ in focus, which I depict here using broad generalizations:
Having just celebrated the 35th anniversary of the origins of the IBM i platform, it’s time to celebrate another milestone: the fourth year of iChime, the online meeting of IBM i friends begun by Charles (Charlie) Guarino in 2020 as a way to stay connected during the pandemic.
IBM Champions Jack Woehr, Niels Liisberg, and Alan Seiden mug for the camera
The Common Europe Congress 2023 in Prague hosted around 400 international attendees steeped in IBM Power Systems from 11 June to 14 June.
This was my first visit to a Common Europe event, and I was greatly impressed. The organization was tight, the venue world-class, and the level of enthusiasm among the participants high. The sessions were interesting and useful.
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.
A few years ago I introduced you to my QShell on i utility – QSHONI. QSHONI makes it easy for traditional CL, RPG, and COBOL programs to call Python utilities and other QShell/PASE utility programs (PHP, Node, Java, etc.) and directly use their output. QSHONI opened up a whole new world of integrations to open source apps from RPG, CL, and COBOL.
In this post I will update you on new features that have been added to the QSHONI utilities over the past 12 months.
A few months after we published the article Apache for IBM i: Where to Find Documentation, astute reader Paul Nicolay of Cegeka shared yet another hard-to-find Apache resource with us.
Paul recommends IBM Support’s IBM HTTP Server for i PCI Compliance page for organizations following the stringent PCI DSS security standard for accepting card payments. In addition to confirming that Apache on IBM i is a PCI-compliant web server, the page lists the IBM i PTFs required to fix known vulnerabilities.
When I told my friends I was learning RPGLE, they thought I had gone a bit crazy. Why would I want to learn that “old” programming language?
My quest stemmed from a common issue that I experienced first hand. As a web developer, I would often hear, “The business logic is located in RPG code and we don’t know what it does. We will have to wait and ask the RPG programmer to explain it to us before we can continue with the project, but that person is too busy now.”
Or worse yet, “We are completely redoing our ERP system because we can’t find RPG programmers.”
A programmer asked recently how to automate their password-based SFTP transfer. How does one automate SFTP or any task that typically requires user interaction?
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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.