May, 2009

New IBM Redbook on IBM i v6.1 security

The IBM i OS (previously i5/OS) is known as one of the more secure operating platforms, but that doesn’t prevent users running the System i from suffering security lapses. Most of these lapses happen not because of the security technology on the platform, but often because the people running the platform aren’t aware of all the security technology available.

A new IBM Redbook is out that could help that problem: Security Guide for IBM i v6.1. The 426-page book is available online and tackles topics such as extended password rules, networking security improvements, and DB2 column encryption.

Young i Professionals keep doing good work, this time in the sandbox

The Young i Professionals have stormed onto the System i scene, injecting some needed energy into the platform. In addition to the social aspects of the group, YiPs has created a sandbox for applications on its website, which we have written about before.

The sandbox is a free way for System i users to test out applications online without any ramifications on their own systems. The new sandbox application from the YiPs is webERP, a Web-based accounting and ERP program. The only things needed to use it are a Web browser and a pdf reader.

Some COMMON presentations

If you weren’t able to attend the COMMON conference this year, we’ve done our best to keep you apprised of what’s been happening. Now we can share with you a presentation on Rational Developer for System i and WebSphere Development Studio Client.

The presentations are courtesy of David Gibbs, a System i software engineer who writes at midrange.com.

IBM i: The tree falling in the forest?

The writers at iDevelop bring up an interesting analogy: Is the IBM i — and its many feature sets — becoming like the tree falling in the forest with no one to hear it?

As proof, the blog cites an example of their own ignorance of a particular IBM i feature. Take a look:

Case in point. We try to keep up with the majority of new stuff, particularly in as much as it affects application development, but we missed this one. It concerns the ability of an RPG program to directly create PDF files. This topic is near and dear to the hearts of many of our clients and often comes up in internet lists. Yet we’ve seen nothing about this–it is buried in the “What’s New” documentation and even once we knew that it was there it still took some time to find it.

This goes beyond just RPG abilities on the System i, of course. If IBM isn’t out there selling the System i to anyone other than people already on the System i, who even knows about it? The tree falling in the forest is slowly disappearing because there are fewer and fewer people around to hear it fall.

The Smart Cube i now on sale in the U.S.

We reported on the IBM Smart Cube i back in December, noting that IBM seemed to want to keep the product secret from many, though it was rolling it out mainly in India. The Smart Cube is almost like a server appliance for the System i, and here are some of the details:

• Three Power-based configurations, with one, two or four processing cores activated.
• Can run IBM i, AIX or Linux using 4.2 GHz Power6 chips
• Includes a stack of systems and application software called the Smart Business Software Pack for i, which runs on the IBM i 6.1 OS

Now the Smart Cube is apparently being rolled out in the United States. The U.S. version, according to the story, has 17 ISVs that are configuring the cubes to run combinations of 45 different applications.

More details on the Power6+ System i boxes

Timothy Prickett Morgan has a good, detailed article on Power6+ midrange servers — the 520, 550, 560 and JS23 and JS43 blades. The servers will be available on May 22 and run on System i 6.1, but unavailable on i5/OS V5R4. The new servers will also support AIX 5.3, AIX 6.1, Novell SLES 10 or later and RHEL 4 Update 5 or later.

RJS Software: We’re not just a System i vendor

Ah, is this really a good sign? RJS Software, which has long sold its product as being a System i product, is now out there pitching its report and document software on other platforms. Take a look:

I just returned from the COMMON 2009 conference in Reno and the main thing I learned from listening to IBM at the opening conference is that they no longer consider the iSeries more than just an OS running on a Power systems box. Why is this a significant event ? Well, we’re starting to see a small although very real shift from some customers towards selecting ERP and other business systems that run on platforms that don’t include OS/400.

While RJS will always remain committed to the native iSeries platform we want to make sure our customers know that even if they do select another platform, our document imaging, electronic forms, workflow and report delivery products are all very capable products running in an iSeries or Multiplatform environment as well. Hopefully for those of you committed to the iSeries, you will be on the platform a long time, but if Windows or some other platform is in your future, feel free to give us a call and we can discuss how your information delivery investment is protected by continuing to choose RJS as your valued information delivery provider.

That’s called survival, and can you really blame RJS Software for doing this?

More talk on COMMON’s future

There has been a rigorous and healthy discussion about the future of COMMON on the Internet in the past couple weeks, in light of the fact that the COMMON board of directors recently announced it would have to make some cutbacks.

By far the cutback people are talking about most is the reduction of compensation to volunteer speakers — whether that be in the form of a free registration, paying for travel and hotel, or other expenses. Jon Paris and Susan Gantner wrote on the topic, which garnered a host of comments touching on the speaking issue.

“I don’t think COMMON realizes how much they are milking the speakers to date,” wrote Aaron Bartell, an IT consultant for System i. “Not only do we get little compensation, but it is lost wages that I am just as concerned about. For example, for the five sessions I gave at COMMON I probably spent a total of 5 to 6hrs per session.”

Bartell added that he also doesn’t have “much use for the ‘COMMON Credits,’ that cover my registration costs because I don’t have a lot of time to attend other sessions.”

Scott Klement, an IT manager and COMMON speaker, had a point to add:

At this conference, there were approx 130 speakers, and (this is a guess, I don’t have any real numbers) perhaps 600 attendees. That’s just speakers, not counting the myriad of other volunteers. Consider that ratio! COMMON definitely needs to trim the fat — they need to reduce spending on volunteers. But they need to do that by reducing the number of sessions, and by limiting the number of volunteer positions.

Cut quantity, but do not sacrifice quality.

I think Klement hits on a good point here. It’s clear that COMMON needs to reduce the number of sessions, but is its approach to doing that the right one? With this kind of cutting, the only people that might be able to speak at future COMMON conferences will be mostly vendors. Now, it’s not necessarily a bad thing to have vendor speakers. But to have only vendors speaking is not good. End users don’t go to COMMON to get sales pitches all day, every day. They go to learn.

So there are a few things I think COMMON could do to keep costs down but still make it a valuable experience for users:

• There should be limited vendor-led sessions that focus on products.
• Vendor sessions that include an end user case study should get better priority. Over and above that, vendor-led sessions that also include the end user as a speaker should get first priority. Vendors should be expected to pay for the end user’s travel expenses, if necessary.
• COMMON should pay for the travel and expenses of key end users — in particular, end users that are receiving awards from COMMON that year, and maybe end users that were award finalists as well. And those end users should lead sessions.

Any other ideas?

Web development on IBM i, what’s important to learn?

On my way to COMMON in Reno, Nev. I happened to be sitting in a seat near another attendee. He found out who I was and unleashed a series of questions about IBM i, specifically with an interest in figuring out how to prioritize the sessions he would attend at the meeting. Some reading and past initiatives had left him a bit bewildered as to what development tools he should focus on learning, and which were disappearing into the ether. I passed the questions on to a couple of our site contributors, Jim Mason and Andrew Borts, as well as COMMON attendee and Midrange.com owner and founder, David Gibbs.

Is IBM’s WebFacing Tool replaced now by HATS, or has it been de-emphasized, or is something else going on?

Borts: WebFacing is now enhanced by HATS – or Host Access Transform Services. This isn’t your mothers “Screen Scraping” software. This is a server based system that takes 3270/5250 applications (e.g., “legacy”) using a macro language with the screen’s behind them and can serve them on a multitude of clients including mobile phones, Firefox, smart phones, and more – not just Web. This option should be considered any time a legacy application needs a little kick for the user communities, giving the ability to make Web-based screens more logical for the users.

Mason: Changes in IBM product managers change strategies. To use WebFacing and HATS now you have to license the server from IBM. HATS is the default dynamic translation of 5250 screens for the Web. You can do customization of screens with WebFacing tools and deploy the customized screens.

Is the “Rational” product something I need to use, or is it more for larger projects that involve multiple people developing and testing?

Borts: Rational Software Solutions were designed to manage large software projects where change control, requirements management, and QA management are combined.

Mason: Rational products are purchased. They are also an option. You don’t need to buy them if you don’t want to. The alternative to RDI for building RPG applications is to do it the old way using SEU and the RPG compiler. The alternative to Rational Application Developer for i to build Web applications is using the free Eclipse BIRT or Web Tools suites. With these, you can do Web reporting, build Web applications, Web services etc.

Is RPG ILE also not a major emphasis anymore? I read the paper by Sharon Hoffman from 2006 that seemed to say the direction was away from RPG and toward JAVA. Does that say time would be better spent working with JAVA than RPG?

Borts: Well, yes and no. Yes, if you have the time and energy, Java is an emerging technology and anything written has some relationship to it. But, learning all the Web technologies – starting with HTML and Javascript, then after those skills are learned (not perfected) you can address the Web technologies such as AJAX applications utilizing CGI back-end software such as RPG (which can run CGI applications), Net.Data, Java (via JSP) and PHP can serve on an iSeries. Ajax allows for partial page refreshes, which makes a Web browser to act more like a PC application. RPG has had major enhancements over the past few years. We have RPG FREE, which is being used more and more (I call this language Java Junior cause it looks like Java!).

Mason: IBM doesn’t have a direction for development for System i. They have options. Sometimes they push one more than the other but there is not a clear strategic direction, just choices available. Your choices are RPG, PHP and Java.

RPG is fine for traditional RPG applications. Despite IBM’s attempts to do better, it’s not a great choice to do Web, Web services or XML applications - newer Java tools are much better.

PHP is a decent environment for building basic Web applications and more and it has good access to i5 OS features in the PHP toolkit for System i. the PHP runtime is OK.

Traditional Java development for i5 OS uses either Rational or Eclipse Web or BIRT tools and the Java Toolkit for the System i. Eclipse and the Java toolkit are both free and very good choices. Java runtime is better than PHP. Now Java development has moved ahead of other options with Groovy and Grails. New Java based on Groovy/Grails is easier to learn and faster to build many types of applications than the other choices. I’ll start covering more on Groovy/Grails for System i in search400 and the Virtual WebSphere Community Edition user group. You can find out general Groovy info and Grails info at the linked websites. I did a hands-on lab at COMMON building a Grails Web database application that created, updated, searched books and authors in a database. All students were RPG with no Web experience and completed the lab in one hour. I also do QuickWeb workshops for companies trying to make transitions to Web technologies quickly.

Gibbs: IMO, RPG and Java best work hand in hand. Java (JSP, servlets) work best for the general user interface with RPG doing the heavy lifting for database and business rules.

How many of these products cost extra? Web application Server? Rational Developer?

Borts: As far as costs, you can serve a Web page with an IBM i for free – all built in. However, many technologies are free. PHP, Net.Data, and CGI are all technologies that require no money up front to load onto the AS/400. Net.Data is actually supplied with the operating system, then RPG CGI can be downloaded from G.B. Peroti’s Web site, Easy400.net, then PHP can be installed on ANY i5 with V5R4 and above (V5R3 is back level supported, but not as many toys as Version meant for V5R4) for free – which fits into any budget. JSP pages can be served using Tomcat, which is supplied with the iSeries in the base OS. To run WebSphere, you need a paid license for the developer seat, and the server.

Mason: Rational tools cost more. The Eclipse suites (based on new Galileo base) for BIRT and Web tools are free. You also need to copy the jt400.jar file from the IFS folder. It connects Java to everything on the System i.

Your application server choices include WebSphere (billable), Apache Tomcat (free) and IBM WebSphere Community Edition (a full JEE server that is free but has options for IBM support plans if you need it for your production environments).

If you ever have questions that you would like to get a few opinions on, don’t forget that you can ask them via IT Knowledge Exchange, or ask a question of a specific expert or send me an email and I’ll shepherd it to the appropriate folks to provide you with answers. Also, please add your input on these questions below.