RPG on System i

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.

System i decline, modernization, and the next 5 years

Bob Cancilla, a former executive in the Rational division of IBM, has started a new blog up in representation of his new company, Reno-based application modernization provider Oxford International. Cancilla opened up his blog with a bang, saying that the IBM i operating system and the RPG programming language are in a state of deep decline with not a lot of support within the IBM organization.

But in addition to decrying the state of the platform, Cancilla offers up possibilities for keeping it alive. You’ll never guess what he suggests. Or maybe you will. That’s right, application modernization! The exact line of business that his new company is in.

Nevertheless, Cancilla has some interesting points about the IBM i platform along with some valuable insights having been there for four years. Here are a few of his suggestions:

Before joining IBM I was CTO for a major insurance company where I ran a development organization that did major in-house development. Our project funding was totally tied to current business objectives and funded by various departments or in certain cases approved by the steering committee by special corporate funding for projects that crossed organizational lines.

What I did not have was money to fund an IT technology project. Even our Y2K work had to be tied into business objectives.

I think that many of your are like I was and have to integrate your modernization initiatives into currently funded projects. I can tell you that my management would never have funded a major conversion initiative as a standalone project. The only way to fund modernization was to show a business need or financial benefit.

RPG decidedly not dead, say Search400.com readers

On June 29, 2009, many Search400.com readers received an email that got them a little stirred up. I sent out our newsletter and presented an article on EGL and a blog on RPGAAS. This is what I wrote:

So is EGL the new high-definition, flat-screen replacement to that old vacuum-tube television? Is RPG really that outdated? Is there a dearth of RPG programmers available, requiring shops to consider the RPGAAS offering? I ask for reader input partly out of sheer curiosity but also out of a desire to serve the informational and educational interests of readers. If RPG is outdated, what do you need to know about instead? Send me your feedback.

Eleven readers were compelled to write back, and not too surprisingly, none of them sung the praises of the fall of RPG. Instead, most made ardent defenses of RPG as a useful and necessary programming language.

Marc Hall wrote:

I don’t believe RPG is outdated. It has become much more like a scientific language since the introduction of procedures, local variables, and pointers. ILE makes reusability easy, with modules and service programs. RPG seems like a very relevant language and I enjoy it. If there are people suggesting that RPG is outdated, why do they say so?

Bob Mizner wrote:

First, let me say that I reject the argument that there is a dearth of RPG programming talent available. This argument fails to understand the dynamics of supply and demand market forces. There is a dearth of RPG positions available to skilled RPG programmers. Don’t believe it? Post a job opening for an RPG programmer offering a competitive salary with benefits; I promise you, within hours you will have a pile of resumes to choose from. I personally know of several traditional RPG programmers who are currently either looking, or have “settled” for other work.

AS/400 shops stopped hiring after Y2K for a number of reasons, but a scarcity of programming talent was not one of them. Younger people who were educated in the 80’s and 90’s on Wintel platforms – and, in some cases, on Unix and Linux, because, after all, that’s what they learned on in college – moved into decision making positions, and lacked a fundamental understanding of what the IBM midrange platform was doing for the organization. [They] made strategic decisions to move off the platform onto newer, sexier platforms that were graphic and Web-enabled, and which made them feel more comfortable. They walked through the organization and saw all these green text-based screens, and wondered why their internal platform wasn’t capable of colorful graphics and Web-based applications that communicated to their customers and supply chain? And when they questioned their staff as to why those kinds of apps were not available, they got answers ranging from “IBM doesn’t support that” or “it’s expensive and difficult to do” on an AS/400-based server. Which is far from the truth …

I personally know of an AS/400 shop who has Web-enabled all of their internal, home-grown applications. Remote locations were able to ditch expensive frame-relay communication networks in favor of DSL lines into each of their 50+ remote locations, domestic and international. Was it expensive? It was, in fact, a fraction of the cost of moving off the AS/400 platform onto something Windows-based, rewriting legacy apps, and installing and maintaining all new Windows-based hardware and networks.

If there is a dearth of anything, it is in ISV’s offering native ERP solutions to businesses. There are a dwindling number of solutions providers who have stayed with the platform; most have developed comparable, competing apps using .Net or other development tools. RPG programmers have had to learn Java, .Net, or now PHP in order to remain employed. Rational tools? EGL? It’s all just additional buzzwords to facilitate IBM’s move away from RPG. IBM sees the writing on the wall, all these young decision-makers wanting graphic and Web-enabled interfaces. So instead of placing development emphasis on making RPG-based apps more modern – perhaps by offering a native CGI for RPG – IBM moves businesses away from the platform, away from the strength of all those legacy apps written in RPG that drive business logic, to newer platforms, newer tools, newer apps written in languages that didn’t exist a decade ago. And probably won’t exist a decade from now. Which means, for businesses who invest in them by developing business logic apps, another conversion, another migration, a decade or so down the line …

Furthermore… vLegaci’s … “RPG as a Service” is nothing more than out-sourced contract development with a new name. A pig is still a pig, and calling it something different don’t make it so. I don’t buy into it as even remotely related to “cloud computing” a.k.a. capacity on demand.

Continued »

Western Power Sports boosts online sales with the System i

Western Power Sports reworked its online presence using Web development tools on the System i, a move that has increased online sales of its power sports equipment fivefold.

Prior to the project, the Boise, Idaho-based company was only generating about 10% of its sales online. Now about half of its sales comes over the Internet, garnering more than 1 million page views, 17,000 orders and about $7.5 million in sales every month.

How did it happen? Well, it almost didn’t. The fast-growing company was outgrowing its outdated Web presence, and needed something that would better integrate with its existing System i platform.

“We didn’t have the time or the ability at that point to develop our own solution,” said Rody Cummings, the company’s IT director. “What we were looking for was a company to sell us a product and also provide a solution they could support.”

What Cummings found was that most products had steep, lengthy learning curves that Western Power Sports didn’t have the time to endure. So the company was leaning toward outsourcing its Web development entirely.

It decided to listen to one more pitch, from a company called Profound Logic. The software vendor sells RPGsp, an RPG-based Web development platform on the System i. Cummings said that halfway through the demonstration, he knew it was something that Western Power Sports could use.

A few weeks later, Western Power Sports had developed a new online platform that was implemented soon after.

“With our previous solution it would have taken a full week of me working with the product along with their team just to get a website online that still had no functionality,” he said.

RPG as a service

Beyond the world of IBM i, the hottest topic in IT right now is “Cloud Computing,” which is essentially a mix of platform and software-as-a-service (PaaS and SaaS) offerings that are available on-demand. So it was with a little amusement and some interest that I read the press release from vLegaci offering RPGAAS. That’s right, RPG as a service.

“… designed for companies who don’t always have an RPG programmer available, or need quick, cost-effective programming results…”

After a year of reading emails from readers inquiring about a variety of topics, I have to think that there is a market for such a product, and vLegaci’s President, Steve Kilner, says that Gartner’s findings support this supposition.

“Consensus is emerging from IT thought leaders such as Gartner Group and Capers Jones that maintaining and modernizing legacy systems gives the best possible return on IT dollars,” said Kilner. “For businesses with legacy RPG systems, the dwindling pool of RPG programmers poses the challenge of how to get unfamiliar programmers up to speed rapidly on complicated legacy code. vLegaci addresses this through the use of its innovative program comprehension tool, Codelyzer. This static and dynamic analysis tool enables new programmers to quickly assess unfamiliar RPG programs, thereby enabling the concept of a service such as RPGAAS.”

What do you think? Is this a service your company could use?

Train your RPG employees and pay them well

It turns out that the secret to retaining good RPG programmers is simple: pay them above average, and train them well.

Is this different from any other profession? Probably not, but in the System i world, holding onto good RPG talent and keeping them happy is not an easy task. During a surprise birthday bash in California, the folks at iDevelop chatted it up with another attendee who manages a team of RPG developers. Here’s their story:

It seems that she must be doing something very right because her team returned a 96+ percent job-satisfaction rating on a recent company-wide survey. The goal the company had set was less than 75 percent so the high rating among the developers was evidence of the great job the management team was doing to keep them happy and productive.

What’s her secret? She attributes it to two major factors. First, they pay attention to salary levels in the industry and make sure they are paying a bit above the average. Secondly, and we personally believe at least as importantly, they make sure all their developers are consistently and regularly trained in the latest features and technologies related to their RPG development. She feels this investment in training not only has the obvious positive benefit of making their applications as good as they can be and the developers as productive as they can be, but it also helps tremendously in staff retention.

Sometimes doing one of the most difficult things — like getting and retaining good RPG developers — takes simple solutions.