Profound Logic has a press release in a recent ITJungle article that touts their latest feature set of having a platform independent UI layer.

Why did this catch my eye?

Well, because this is EXACTLY what IBM should have done when they were going down the EGL route.  What did IBM do?  They tried to convince shops that have millions invested in languages like RPG that they should just start migrating that entire infrastructure to be controlled by EGL.  IBM wanted to start supporting a single business language across all its platforms (essentially making it easy for them, but hard for those who’ve already adopted one of their other business languages).  The problem with that approach? I DON’T HAVE ISSUE WITH RPG, I HAVE ISSUE WITH MY USER INTERFACE – they are not one in the same and I won’t throw the baby out just because the bath water is dirty. Why not just change the portion of my programming stack that I have issue with.  Why not just change the portion of my programming stack that can’t run natively on IBM i anyways (i.e. talking specifically how the browser runs many UI’s now and in the future).

What’s interesting about Profound’s new features is a shop that has .NET/Java/RPG/PHP/etc can all use a single front-end HTML/CSS/Javascript layer for designing screens without each one of those platforms having to ditch the server side language that works best for the OS they are running on.

I have to give some serious kudos to Profound for this one.  I think it is right on the money.  And by storing the screen definition in a non-proprietary very open standard format (JSON) they are ready for change when the next popular UI technology comes down the pipe (maybe from Google?).

I am curious as to whether they will release an express version of this suite so their presence in other servers can grow  more quickly  - a lot of non-IBM i UI frameworks offer a “free drink” of their tooling (with restrictions) and then use that as a loss leader to get you on a full subscription.

On final note, this approach of having the UI layer agnostic of the server side and stores a formal definition decoupled from the UI technology needs a name.  How about “4GL for UI”  or maybe “4GLUI”.  When you sound that out it kinda sounds catchy – four glu-ee :-)  Ok, I obviously need more coffee.

AaronBartell.com

I’ve been following an interesting development the past couple months and now it has been made public (at COMMON) so I thought I’d make sure everyone knew about it.  The product is “AO Foundation” (AO = Adsero Optima) and is meant to aid in modernizing your DB to be built on SQL.  I haven’t yet had a chance to use the product but it looks very intriguing.  Below is the official press release from TEMBO Technology Lab:

TEMBO Technology Lab (Pty) Ltd is honored to announce the availability of their AO Foundation product that facilitates upgrading and migrating all ISAM (record level access – DDS) databases to the native SQE (SQL) engine without the use of surrogates, any LVLID changes or any recompilation of programs.

Anaheim, California –(May 6, 2012)– TEMBO Technology Lab, a specialist applications modernization technology development house in the IBM i platform space, today announced the availability of AO Foundation, a product that facilitates and automates the migration of all legacy (ISAM or DDS) databases to the latest DDL (SQL/SQE) implementation of DB2 on IBM i.

SQL (DDL) the foundation of all modernization

Should the IBM modernization roadmap and all the announcements since approximately 2000 be closely analyzed, it is clear that the SQL database engine is a fundamental consideration for modernization. Until this announcement, migrating to the SQL engine has been either labor intensive, or at least problematic. This is caused by either the use of surrogates, or the requirement to recompile your programs.

The requirement to truly modernize our rich heritage (the so-called “legacy” which made companies hugely successful), demands that users migrate to the SQL engine, to truly leverage the applications and the platform, and to use the SQL engine as foundation for all modernization.

For a short Videoclip, detailing the roadmap, visit http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P7u-2MxU8F0

The benefits from following this modernization roadmap:

Immediate, low risk, non-disruptive exploitation of the native SQL database engine.

* Solid foundation for future modernization projects.

* Your database now presents itself as modern to the outside world and your end users.

* AO Foundation removes the tedium and error-prone repetition out of upgrading to the SQL (SQE) engine, allowing you to focus on value adding aspects of application modernization.

* No “vendor lock-in” – we deliver your database back completely under your control.

* No LVLID changes during Phase 1 (initial DDS to DDL migration) of database upgrade process, hence no recompilation of ANY code.

* Massive potential performance benefits

* AGILITY

* FULL, native IBM i based management of your ISAM and SQL database(s) on DB2 for i.

* Gradual, non-disruptive, low-risk roadmap

* Unshackled applications, unlocking the full value of your IT investments

* Gradual sanitizing of metadata, structural metadata and database

* Multi-Tier architecture

Visit Adsero Optima: www.adsero-optima.com

Soli Deo Gloria!

I am getting involved in a lot more mobile and web development projects on IBM i with RPG as of late.  One of the things that most ALWAYS comes up is security.  It is a big jump for an IT shop that has never exposed their IBM i on the internet to switch gears and believe it is a safe thing to do.

Putting something on the internet is NEVER 100% safe.  Too many people out there thinking it’s “fun” to wreck your company (though I must say that some companies had it coming when Anonymous let loose on them).  Ok, now that we’ve established the reality that the internet is NOT safe we can move forward :-)

This post is meant to collect resources for those wanting to learn more about securing their IBM i to be on the internet.

For starters I will list a couple links:

System i Internet Security: http://ibm.co/IT2xmu

HackingiSeries.com

IBM i Security Administration and Compliance: http://amzn.to/InmGE2

Please continue to add to the list…

AaronBartell.com

Heyo,

Wanted to drop a note about a recent interview I had with Dan Burger of ITJungle.  You can check it out here.

Here’s what I want to call out as a focal point of the interview:

“It was fun to see that many young people interested in the platform,” Bartell said. “The first question I asked was ‘How many are here because you thought I was going to teach you how to play role playing games?’ A couple people raised their hands. But at the end of the session I had some of the programming students, who had never heard of RPG or IBM i, approached me and said ‘All right, you sold me. I like what I’m hearing. Now how do I get onto a machine?‘”

Bartell had to admit he didn’t know of a place where students could get free access to IBM i, but he does know that he’d like to push some buttons at IBM to take care of these interested young people that are thinking of developing the next social media sites. They won’t be doing it on IBM i, if they’ve never heard of it or have no access to it is his point.

I am not sure what else to do on the front of trying to get easy (emphasis on EASY) access to IBM i for college students (I won’t digress as to the issues with all of the “options” currently out there, though if you’d like, I will).  Why are we (the IBM platform/community) yet again behind the curve of getting things accomplished?  Why aren’t we learning from the likes of http://www.heroku.com

If you can’t tell, I am frustrated!! All of this young talent – interested in IBM i – and no place to let them adopt.  I am starting to wonder if I should just go into “wait and see” mode instead of constantly pushing the envelope for IBM (or somebody) to realize the potential for IBM i with college students – THEY are the only chance IBM i has of surviving.

Part of me just wants to soil my pants so I can be mad at something else and get this issue out of my frontal lobe.  Ok, that was probably too much info, but you get my point.

Going back to my hole…

AaronBartell.com

ITJungle published an article today concerning Connectria hosting IBM i in the cloud for under $500/month.  I now count three (3) vendors that offer hosting environments at this price point:

Symmetry Corp (my hosting provider)

Abascus LLC

Connectria

This is great news because progress is being made.  What progress is that?  Well, if you host with these guys you don’t have to deal directly with IBM which takes talent (literally) to navigate efficiently their waters of procurement (I’ve done this three times and hope I never need to buy another machine directly from IBM).

What’s more interesting is the companies mentioned in the ITJungle article:

Louis Vuitton, Things Remembered, Paramount Studios, ASD, Purolator, Ecko Unlimited, Gulfstream and Ansell Healthcare.  These aren’t small developer shops that were looking for inexpensive hosting as is my case.  Instead these companies have a lot of risk-to-savings research onus by moving to cloud.  Evidently it made dollars and cents.

What conversations are being had in your IT dept about putting your IBM i in the cloud?  I couldn’t say it is for everyone, but it is good to know EXACTLY why it isn’t good for you so you can answer that question in a meeting, but also so you can choose to go cloud once that issue has been removed.

NEUGC and IBM Cloud

While on the subject of cloud… I attended a NEUGC.org conference session given by IBM’er Rob Bestgen and can say without a doubt that IBM is taking cloud seriously - even to the point where they are leading in areas I haven’t even seen on Amazon EC2 or VMWare (i.e. systematic application deployment based on industry specs – more on that later).

In my opinion the reality/acceptance/popularity of “cloud” has the ability to make IBM i as prolific and significant as it was in the late 80’s.

Why?  Because it enables third parties like Connectria to more easily provide third party IBM i hosting services that can be setup in automated fashion (see this youtube video for how the IBM Virtual Loaner Program works: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rXk5t7gYm1c) at a fraction of the cost of acquisition.  The last bit is for IBM to address cloud licensing, which I have been told is a high priority within their walls.

The IBM i OS is ready for cloud, but what about everything that sits on top of the OS (i.e. programming languages and programming runtime environments). What, if anything, do we need from RPG to make it even more cloud ready?

AaronBartell.com

For those of you in the Anaheim, CA area you might want to check out a free conference coming up titled “i Believe”.  It is being put on by the people at lookSoftware and aims to draw a picture of IBM i’s future.  Read more about it at ITJungle.  Some excellent speakers will be there including Trevor Perry (guaranteed entertainment :-), Frank Soltis, Jon Paris, Susan Gantner and Alison Butterill.

Unfortunately I won’t be making it to COMMON this year because I just had too much travel going on this spring (just got done doing 4 conferences in two weeks) otherwise I would be at the iBelieve conference.

Oh and I am sure Pascal Polverini will be there.  Pascal is a fun guy that has excitement about IBM i/RPG ideas seething from his every pore.  It’s fun being around him.

You going?  Spread the word…

AaronBartell.com

Excuses are like belly buttons – everyone has one.  Well, almost everyone – not Gary.

Let me backup a bit… Today I am at the RPG and DB2 Summit conference presenting and vending – doing my best to encourage people to learn new things like mobile development for IBM i with RPG.

Before going on please head over to Jeff’s recent blog entry and read it from start to finish.

Gary’s face told a story that he’d lived a lot of life.  Gary was a trucker that wanted to better the situation he was in.  Gary was willing to do WHATEVER it took to move forward in life. When we met up with him at 4am in the hotel lobby (he was there to get free access to wifi I assumed) he had already been working through the night on his assignments from the local tech college.  What’s funny is Gary was a complete noob to Java programming (literally was writing his first Java program) but wasn’t letting the accompanying-Java-fears overwhelm him and in fact was looking for ways to go above and beyond his professors assignment because he was having so much fun – his creativity, enthusiasm, and drive couldn’t be stopped.

What’s the state of your excuses for not doing modern stuff in your IT job? Has someone or something robbed you of excitement? Have you let your mind convince you that an “adventure in IT” can’t be had because of all life’s commitments?

Gary chose to be upbeat.  He chose to challenge himself even at the expense of sleep.  He had many sayings he mentioned during my short time with him and I thought I’d share my favorite… “It’s better to be a smart ass than a dumb ass” – true’r words were never spoken :-)

Get rid of excuses.  Get a new perspective.   Live life again.

AaronBartell.com

p.s. yes, I did feel like a motivational speaker with that last line :-)

Ok, so this post has nothing to do with chocolate pie, but I knew that is the only way I could get some of you to read it – you know, us guys talk via hunger pains :-)

Anyways, there is some recent buzz about a secret open source project/product that is about to be revealed in the near future from GEMKO titled “Inuendo”.  You can learn more about it from this ITJungle article.

The guy heading it up is Chris Burns.  Chris is one of those types of guys that anyone can get along with – easy going, humble, hard worker, etc.  I first met him when we were both tasked with writing the most recent IBM RPG certification test.  You can learn a lot about people when you stick them in a room for an entire week :-)

Anyways, if you want to get in on the action then see about heading to the below GoToMeeting on April 3rd:

1.  Please join my meeting, Tuesday, April 03, 2012 at 4:00 PM Eastern Daylight Time.
https://www3.gotomeeting.com/join/114757774

2.  Join the conference call:

Dial +1 (267) 507-0003
Access Code: 114-757-774
Audio PIN: Shown after joining the meeting

Meeting ID: 114-757-774

I am pumped. You know how you wait for that absolutely golden project to come down the pipe – the type where you work early mornings and late nights because it sings so true to your heart?  Well, that project just landed in my lap and I am super pumped.

A little history is probably in order.  The past 5 years I have been part of a team that puts on the annual LivestockMN event.  My responsibilities have mostly been in the area of lining up bands to play at the event, but this year somebody else is going to take that on and

I instead am taking on the donations role (i.e. the process of accepting cash/check/credit at the event, tallying up totals, providing updates to the bands on stage to announce to the audience, etc).  Well, me being the geek I am decided that we needed more technology involved to streamline processes for the day of the event.  So I thought “why not create an app so people can donate from wherever they are at during the music festival“.

The app I am going to create will be mobile based so that not only can event organizers accept donations at the various booths using iPads and the like, but people sitting in the audience will be able to hit that same site with their smart phone and submit their own donation right from where they are sitting!  And not only that, when they give a donation they can add a little message like “I just bought a goat!  Hurray for cheese!“ that will be projected on a large screen up by the stage that will convey totals and messages from the audience (messages will be filtered of course ;-).

The front-end will most likely use Sencha Touch and the backend will be RPG with DB2 on IBM i communicating with a 501c3 PayPal account to process the credit cards.  Cool eh? :-)

I’ve had this project in the queue for a couple months and the reason I got so excited recently is because I had a call with one of WorldVisions IT Directors to discuss this effort and they are going give me any resources I might need and hope to collaborate throughout the effort so they can do similar things and even maybe use some of the code from this project for their mobile efforts!  That’s why this project has become so cool – it aligns my profession (geek), my favorite platform and language (IBMi/RPG) and my belief in Jesus and his teachings which is where volunteer organization (LivestockMN.com) and my favorite non-profit (WorldVision) come into play (i.e. helping those in need).  Does it get any better than that?

Stay tuned for an article series that describes how this project was accomplished from start to finish.

FUN FUN FUN!!!!

AaronBartell.com

First let me say that I am somewhat frustrated at IBM right now.  No, not the entire IBM company, just the sales arm.  You see, back on Dec 19th 2011 I went to the Rational webpage to gain insight as to the pricing of the ILE Compilers so I could determine whether I should purchase them outright or have our IBM i cloud provider, Symmetry Corp, lease them to us.  Firstly I was hoping I could just order them easily with my credit card.  Since that didn’t appear to be an option I instead had a chat with “Farooq” (included below – yes I saved the chat because I thought this would happen) to see what I needed to do to get a quote.

JUST TODAY I FINALLY RECEIVED A RESPONSE TO MY REQUEST FOR QUOTE!  If you are good at counting you would come up with 12 1/2 weeks that I had to wait for them to hand it off to a business partner so I could finally start getting a quote.

I AM SORRY IBM BUT MY BUSINESS DOES NOT MOVE THAT SLOW!  GET YOUR ACT TOGETHER!  I WORK DAMN HARD TO SUPPORT YOU VIA COMMUNITY EFFORTS AND THEN I SEE SUCH PISS POOR SALES PRACTICES THAT I AM EMBARRASSED FOR YOU AND THINK “WHY DO I EVEN BOTHER SPENDING THE TIME PROMOTING YOU TO THE NEXT GENERATION”!!

With the advent of IBMi in the cloud which introduces the possibility for NEW IBM i customers, well, this is something that MUST be fixed (i.e. obtaining pricing and subsequent software in easy fashion).

Again, I am not mad at the IBM tech people (thanks to them I have an excellent platform/language/DB to meet business needs) I am mad that the sales people that so incredibly poorly mis represent the second-to-none technology that the IBM tech people produce.  It’s almost as if IBM sales has a disdain for IBM i related software/hardware.  If I was a tech person at IBM I would be completely pissed off that all my hard work is left in the hands of some inept sales personnel that doesn’t understand urgency or courtesy.

Bah, I think it’s time to start happy hour early this Friday…

Instant Chat With IBM on Dec 19th 2011 (scroll with your mouse inside this window)