AS/400

The intermediate IBM i 6.1.1 version

I recently wrote about the next version of the IBM i operating system, formerly called i5/OS. It is due out next year. But in the meantime, IBM has come out with an intermediate version of IBM i 6.1.1. Once you get past all those decimal points, you may want to know what the heck it is, what it does, and why it might be useful to install.

For that we have Steve Will, the chief IBM i architect, who wrote about “What is This ‘.1′ Anyway?” for IBM Systems Magazine. Dawn May also writes about it in her post, “Install IBM i Over the Network.”

Several prominent speakers pull out of COMMON

Several prominent members of the System i community who usually give some of the best received presentations at COMMON user group meetings will not be doing that anymore, at least for the foreseeable future.

Jon Paris, Susan Gantner and Paul Tuohy are among the list of people who will pass on presenting at the COMMON show in Orlando next May. It is clear that COMMON’s recent cutbacks will have substantial effects on the look and feel of the show. Perhaps the biggest cut of all is COMMON’s decision to reduce compensation to volunteer speakers — whether that be in the form of a free registration, paying for travel and hotel, or other expenses. It certainly was one of the major factors that led to Paris’s and Ganter’s decision:

Had it not been for the need to examine our participation from a financial perspective, we would probably have continued on autopilot, delivering sessions along with our other volunteer duties, as we’ve done every time a COMMON conference rolled around. Being forced to think about whether we could afford to do that next year also caused us to think about why we were doing it in the first place and whether the time, money and energy we’ve been donating to COMMON represent the best way for us to help the community.

This weekend we found ourselves at the moment of truth, wrestling with the decision to either accept or decline our sessions that had been selected for the spring conference. We concluded that we still wanted to support the idea of COMMON, but increasingly it became apparent that the COMMON we wanted to support was an idealized organization that existed only in our minds. We had hoped the old COMMON could return and we worked with many other volunteers to make that a reality, but for whatever reasons COMMON’s direction seems to be set. For the time being we’ll remain members of COMMON and hope that things will change.

Paris and Gantner added that they won’t, by any means, just disappear from the System i landscape. They just plan to put their efforts into other System i educational and social endeavors, among them the Young i Professionals, iManifest, and local System i user groups.

Even those continuing to participate in COMMON shows realize the problems with the user group’s cutbacks to volunteers. Scott Klement, for example, will be going because Systemi Network is paying for him. But he said that he’s “not happy with COMMON’s attitude towards its volunteers, and (he) sincerely hope(s) they re-think their direction.”

Meanwhile, Don Rima, a longtime IBM midrange user who just recently started the Tennessee Valley Midrange User Group, let loose:

Oh, I think that Jon and Susan are the tip of the iceberg of what’s to come not only from a presenter standpoint but from an attendee standpoint. And as much as I like Jon and Susan and as super as thier presentations are, I find it hard to believe that there’s NOBODY else out there that can do presentations on RPG, ILE…etc… Yet, it was absolutely shocking to find that there were NO sessions on RPG, ILE, CL or any of the other traditional “AS/400″ languages offered at IBM’s tech conf this past September.

And if COMMON continues to capitulate to IBM’s demands that it become a AIX user group, it will also go the way of User Blue – even though User Blue had alot of help in its demise from SHARE, IMHO.

 

 

RPG Open I/O in IBM i 6.1.1 and 7.1

After attending the RPG & DB2 summit in October 2009, Profound Logic founder, Alex Roytman, got interested in some of the features that will be released in the upcoming versions of the IBM i operating system. Roytman is joined by Philip Roestamadji, marketing director at Profound Logic, and they discuss what they learned about RPG Open I/O. Two highlights include the possibility of using RPG to access non-DB2 databases, making RPG work with Oracle or MySQL databases, the other is using RPG to interface with browser applications to interface with browser applications, XML or mobile devices.

The team at Profound Logic is interested in getting feedback on what you would like them to cover in future videos. Leave your comments here or contact them directly.

Young i Professionals start Virtual Learning Center

The Young i Professionals group has launched its Virtual Learning Center, a way for IT pros go to get online tutorials on the System i platform.

One of the early goals of the group was educational, and the VLC is a step in that direction. The YiPs, which started a couple years ago and continues to chug along, have a few tutorials already up on the site, mainly on PHP, Rational Developer for System i (RDi) and WebSphere. Other categories not filled yet include others related to programming, such as RPG, Java and C, as well as hardware and operating system categories.

The free tutorials now are just text, but the VLC is able to expand to videos, Q&As and other formats.

What you can do to spur growth in System i

Trevor Perry writes this week about a recent System i conference he went to, and a panel session he moderated. Anyone who knows Perry knows that he complains about the complainers. That is, he criticizes those who bemoan platform name changes, IBM’s marketing of the System i, and so forth.

This time, however, I think he has a solid argument.

Perry recalled how, during the panel session, the discussion arose regarding the shrinking pool of System i developers out there. Some panel members pointed to the IBM Academic Initiative, which has gotten some System i-related courses in universities and community colleges. Attendees supported this kind of educational effort, but as Perry writes, the complaints continued:

And the conversation went around and around. And the complaints continued. While we all love love love the platform, there are not enough people who know about IBM i, not enough new programmers working on IBM i, not enough, not enough, not enough… So, I asked everyone in the room – about 40 or so, some questions I have used with the i community in the past. I had just not paid attention to the answer.

The questions were:

• “How many of you have talked to your local college or school and encouraged them to teach IBM i and RPG?”
• “How many of you have hired interns from local colleges to work with your IT department with IBM i and RPG?”
• “How many of you have told someone outside this community about this amazing platform?”

As Perry recalls, there was a lot of uncomfortable silence following those questions, and Perry knew why. Because they hadn’t actually done any of those things. He thinks that everyone in the System i community — not only IBM, the ISVs, the VARs and the consultants, but the end users too — should be participating and doing things to further the platform. He has a point.

Top 10, er, 20 reasons to move to IBM i 6.1

Craig Johnson at IBM Systems Magazine has his top 10 list, which morphed into a top 20 list. It starts with a push toward blades and ends with a pitch saying the OS is available on DVD. Here are the top 5. Check out the link for the rest:

1. Enable consolidation of i and x86 servers with an IBM BladeCenter solution. IBM i 6.1 is supported in IBM BladeCenter S and H with BladeCenter JS12, JS22, JS23 and JS43 blades.
2. Reduce impact of planned and unplanned outages with a high-availability solution from IBM. IBM i 6.1 supports the new PowerHA for i disk-clustering solution.
3. Better performance for i and IBM System Storage environments through improved storage-area network (SAN) support. i 6.1 with POWER6 processor based-servers and a new Fibre Channel Adapter can deliver performance with the DS8000 that’s comparable to internal disk.
4. Increased performance for Java and WebSphere applications with IBM i 6.1 enhancements. In Java-application performance tests, IBM i delivered 68-78 percent more transactions per second than i 5.4 running on the same POWER5+ processor-based server.
5. Reduce IT costs with an easy, integrated, Web-based management environment. IBM i 6.1 delivers Systems Director Navigator for i that enables Web-based management. Navigator integrates with IBM Systems Director 6.1 providing a rich management environment for multiple, heterogeneous servers.

COBOL turns 50

On Friday evening, I was browsing the Twitterverse and saw that I had missed some fun news. On Friday, September 18th, 2009, the COmmon Business Oriented Language (COBOL) turned 50. Though, earlier articles claimed that it’s birth date was back in May (you can decide for yourself which is more accurate).

But, despite it’s ability to hang in there, a MicroFocus survey found that many people don’t know that the activities they perform daily relies on the language — only 23% of respondants knew what the language was!

According to a November 2008 Datamonitor report, 60-80% of the world`s enterprises rely on COBOL to run their business. There are over 200 billion lines of COBOL currently in operation globally across every industry, and the language supports over 30 billion transactions per day. And there are 1.5-2 million developers working with COBOL code, collectively adding around 5 billion new lines of COBOL to live systems annually.

MicroFocus launched an official celebratory Web page in honor of the occasion, and is soliciting videos and stories and helpful tips about the language.

The System i five-layer cake: Yum

IBM i Chief Architect Steve Will has a post describing the five integral layers of the System i operating system, formerly called i5/OS. They are:

1. Integrated Middleware
2. “The” Operating System
3. Technology Independent Machine Interface
4. Licensed Internal Code
5. Hypervisor

Will sums it up at the end:

In summary, the robust IBM i operating system is flexible and long-lived largely due to this layered architecture. When we talk about IBM i, we’re talking about all of these layers in combination. I hope this brief introduction helps you understand the value that comes to you when you run IBM i, and why the IBM i development team continues to work hard to bring you this great integrated operating system.

The AS/400: Good for crime

A new book by financial journalist Erin Arvedlund says that Bernie Madoff ran his massive Ponzi schemes using nothing other than an AS/400. The book, called “Too Good to be True: The Rise and Fall of Bernie Madoff,” is out this month.

To be fair, this isn’t the first time the possibility has been mentioned. After doing a quick search, I found that Alex Woodie at IT Jungle wrote about it months ago after Fox Business News reported on it.

From a Bloomberg review of the Arvedlund book:

Essential to the fraud was Madoff’s old clunker of a computer, an IBM AS/400 that he and select other employees could use to manipulate prices, the book says.

“Madoff and other employees on 17 punched in the stock prices on the IBM AS/400 and would just enter stock prices that would square with his fake returns,” Arvedlund says, after inexplicably telling us one page earlier that “no one touched” the computer but Madoff.

You’ll learn a lot by reading “Too Good to Be True.” One solemn message is that there are a lot of crooked rich people. Another is that there are a lot of dumb rich people, too.

My guess is that most readers of this blog would be less upset that an AS/400 was used in this scheme than the fact that the book author and reviewer referred to it as an “old clunker of a computer.” Either way, in her article, Woodie interviewed Rich Loeber, the president of Kisco Information Systems, which has Madoff associates in its marketing databases and may have sold software to Madoff. Loeber concluded that the AS/400 certainly can’t take the fall here.

“I don’t see how anyone can control how the hardware is used,” Loeber says. “Over the years, I’ve given this much thought and my final conclusion is that computers are morally neutral. How they are used is where the morals come in, and that is all controlled by people. I would not be surprised that AS/400s are used in all sorts of immoral ways, Madoff’s company just being one such example.”

Instructional AJAX videos

Generating an AJAX response to RPG or PHP requests
Building an AJAX program is a lot like building a dynamic HTML page says Profound Logic founder, Alex Roytman, but you output text or data interchange format (XML, Javascript object notation) instead of HTML. Hany Elemary, Web developer and analyst from Profound Logic, demonstrates how to output a product description in plain text in response to an AJAX request that provides a product ID on the IBM i using PHP. Alex Roytman demonstrates the same procedure using RPG.

Using AJAX libraries
In a follow-up to a earlier video in which viewers were directed to use the AJAX library, Profound Logic’s David Russo, the main developer and architect of the company’s JavaScript AJAX library explains how to use AJAX libraries.

The team at Profound Logic is interested in getting feedback on what you would like them to cover in future videos. Leave your comments here or contact them directly.