Since IBM announced Yum support for installing the IBM i Db2 ODBC driver, as documented in our recent tutorial, users can update their driver more easily.
To help users determine what’s changed, IBM maintains a list of fixes and enhancements for each IBM i ODBC driver release.
(Co-written with Alan Seiden)
Continuous Integration (CI) ensures that every time a developer commits changes to a version control system such as Git, the code is automatically built and subjected to automated tests.
CI has been invaluable to us. As maintainers of PHP’s PDO_IBM and ibm_db2 extensions, we use CI to ensure high quality across platforms.
Platforms supported by PHP’s extensions for Db2 include IBM i, Unix/Linux, and Windows. While our focus is IBM i, we must ensure compatibility with the others. Reliance on manual testing would introduce the risk of broken builds or subtle bugs. Automation is a must.
In this post, we explain how we use CI principles when building and testing PHP’s Db2 extensions.
One of the open source components we’ve built at Seiden Group is a new extension to enhance PHP’s integration with IBM i.
Although most business requirements are met by the existing ibm_db2 and PDO_ODBC extensions plus the PHP Toolkit, the new php-ibmi makes it easier to accomplish several (formerly) difficult or impossible tasks—especially for tool vendors, and when troubleshooting.
We’ve built six functions thus far, with the possibility of more in the future. Let us know what you think.
An article about building C++ software for macOS might seem out of the ordinary for Seiden Group, a company that focuses on IBM i, but we have a good reason: we’ve been enhancing open source tools for PHP and Python. One of these is KCachegrind, an open source visualization tool that integrates with PHP’s Xdebug’s powerful application profiler and Python’s cprofile.
While KCachegrind and its cousin QCachegrind are easily available for Linux, only very outdated builds were available for Windows, and none at all for macOS. To rectify the situation, we’ve been making enhancements; providing QCachegrind builds for the community; and documenting how to use QCachegrind with Xdebug.
We’ve learned how to build cross-platform applications that work well on a Mac. This article documents many of the challenges we faced and solutions we found.
After a friend installed Python 3.9 side-by-side with Python 3.6, he asked, “I noticed that the newer version, Python 3.9, became the default on my IBM i system. How did the default version get set?” We explained how IBM used the update-alternatives program to set the default version of Python and other open source software packages.
Setting up the open source environment on IBM i from Access Client Solutions (ACS) is usually easy, but sometimes you can run into problems. The most common error is when ACS claims that the environment is already set up (“bootstrapped”), when in fact it isn’t.
If you download files onto your system using PHP, Yum, RPM, or other tools, there’s a good chance curl is involved.
The version of curl provided in IBM i PASE uses multiple threads to speed up common tasks such as DNS lookups. When threading support is not available, however, curl fails.
Python on IBM i has proven itself as a tool for building utilities to create/read Excel files, transfer data, automate processes, call REST APIs such as Salesforce and ServiceNow, monitor applications, and more. What was missing was an easy way to use the power of Python from CL and RPG.
In 2019 we introduced you to the PYRUN command for running Python scripts from CL and RPG programs.
In this post we introduce you to QSHPYRUN, the next generation of PYRUN and part of Richard Schoen’s open source QShell on i Library – QshOni. QSHONI makes it easy for traditional CL and RPG programs to call Python utilities and use their output. This is supported via the QSHPYRUN command. QSHONI also supports general calls to other QShell, PASE and bash calls via the QSHEXEC and QSHBASH commands. This means QSHONI commands support calling Python, Node, PHP, Java and all things open source, making QSHONI much more versatile than the standalone PYRUN command was. The QSHONI commands can safely live side-by-side with the PYRUN command because they live in different IBM i libraries. This allows for migration to QSHPYRUN to happen as needed. Read more →
(Co-authored by Gautier Dumas and Calvin Buckley)
When we use open source languages such as PHP, Python, and Node.js on IBM i to help companies build and access APIs and other resources, we expect these resources to be protected with encryption (for example, the https:// protocol). Further protection is provided by an SSL / TLS certificate that can be authorized, or signed, by a popular certificate authority such as Verisign, Comodo, or Let’s Encrypt, or signed internally by the company itself.
Self-signed certificates are most useful in situations where public trust of a certificate is unnecessary, such as:
IBM i developers now have an alternative to proprietary data visualization tools to pinpoint potential bottlenecks in PHP, Python, and Node.js code. QCachegrind, an open source tool developed by KDE, turns raw application profiling data into meaningful graphs and visualizations that highlight a program’s most time-consuming functions.