Before we go any further, a belated "Happy Thanksgiving" to our American readers (and a very belated one to our fellow Canadians!). So that those of you elsewhere in the world don't feel left out, "Happy Tuesday" to all of you!
As we write this we are en route home after spending Thanksgiving with two great groups of people: Susan's family in Atlanta and the members of AMCU, the Atlanta User Group. The board members of AMCU are typical of the many hard-working LUG leaders around the world who give up their spare time to help promote the system they love and to ensure that fellow fans can be kept up-to-date on the happenings in the IBM i world.
This meeting was the first to be organized by our friend Darryl Freinkel, who has just assumed the role of education coordinator for the group. Knowing that many members are being challenged to maintain the role of IBM i in their shops, Darryl wanted to start the season off with something a bit different that could help the members in their fight to keep the i alive and well. Together we came up with a seminar based around open-source software and how it could be used to stretch budgets and shorten the ever-present end-user wish list.
We were quite pleased with the result and, from the reaction of the audience, we weren't the only ones. We started off the session by sharing with the group a number of success stories of companies who have used open-source software to help them leverage and modernize their existing applications. We then looked briefly at a number of specific open-source applications such as SugarCRM, the Mantis help-desk package and various other offerings. Susan then described how the MySQL database works on IBM i, and in particular how the MySQL DB2 Storage Engine can be exploited to allow sharing of MySQL data. Why is this important? Because nearly all open-source software, and a significant amount of commercial software, is written to utilize the MySQL database. By utilizing the DB2 Storage Engine, we can take advantage of open-source software written for MySQL while giving our RPG and COBOL programs access to the same data. That's a pretty powerful option. Many attendees were quite surprised to see that good old PDM option 18 could be used to update a DB2 table and see the results of that change reflected back in a MySQL utility program. We wrapped up the session with Jon providing a brief introduction to two PHP Application Frameworks (ATK and Xataface) to demonstrate how quickly simple multi-table applications can be built using such tools. We mentioned the frameworks in IBM i EXTRA e-newsletter articles--"Exploring ATK" and "Two New Open-Source Database Tools." We wrapped up the session with a brief Q and A before all going our separate ways.
One of the more intriguing aspects of the meeting was that one of the attendees was new to the group--not only that, but he was not an IBM i user! He's a PHP and Java consultant who having heard that PHP was available on the IBM i, decided to check out for himself the stories of the legendary reliability and ease of use, etc., of the platform. His original forays were at the COMMON conference in Reno, Nev., where he attended several of our sessions. When he saw that we were speaking in Atlanta on the topic of open source he decided to take the opportunity to come along and meet some of the local user community. The result was typical of the type of synergy that we need to see more of--members of the PHP and Java communities being introduced to the platform, and members of the IBM i community realizing that there are resources that they can call on to aid them in their early explorations of these technologies.
There's a whole new world out there folks and it can help you maintain the vitality of the IBM i within your shops. Go check it out.
As we write this we are en route home after spending Thanksgiving with two great groups of people: Susan's family in Atlanta and the members of AMCU, the Atlanta User Group. The board members of AMCU are typical of the many hard-working LUG leaders around the world who give up their spare time to help promote the system they love and to ensure that fellow fans can be kept up-to-date on the happenings in the IBM i world.
This meeting was the first to be organized by our friend Darryl Freinkel, who has just assumed the role of education coordinator for the group. Knowing that many members are being challenged to maintain the role of IBM i in their shops, Darryl wanted to start the season off with something a bit different that could help the members in their fight to keep the i alive and well. Together we came up with a seminar based around open-source software and how it could be used to stretch budgets and shorten the ever-present end-user wish list.
We were quite pleased with the result and, from the reaction of the audience, we weren't the only ones. We started off the session by sharing with the group a number of success stories of companies who have used open-source software to help them leverage and modernize their existing applications. We then looked briefly at a number of specific open-source applications such as SugarCRM, the Mantis help-desk package and various other offerings. Susan then described how the MySQL database works on IBM i, and in particular how the MySQL DB2 Storage Engine can be exploited to allow sharing of MySQL data. Why is this important? Because nearly all open-source software, and a significant amount of commercial software, is written to utilize the MySQL database. By utilizing the DB2 Storage Engine, we can take advantage of open-source software written for MySQL while giving our RPG and COBOL programs access to the same data. That's a pretty powerful option. Many attendees were quite surprised to see that good old PDM option 18 could be used to update a DB2 table and see the results of that change reflected back in a MySQL utility program. We wrapped up the session with Jon providing a brief introduction to two PHP Application Frameworks (ATK and Xataface) to demonstrate how quickly simple multi-table applications can be built using such tools. We mentioned the frameworks in IBM i EXTRA e-newsletter articles--"Exploring ATK" and "Two New Open-Source Database Tools." We wrapped up the session with a brief Q and A before all going our separate ways.
One of the more intriguing aspects of the meeting was that one of the attendees was new to the group--not only that, but he was not an IBM i user! He's a PHP and Java consultant who having heard that PHP was available on the IBM i, decided to check out for himself the stories of the legendary reliability and ease of use, etc., of the platform. His original forays were at the COMMON conference in Reno, Nev., where he attended several of our sessions. When he saw that we were speaking in Atlanta on the topic of open source he decided to take the opportunity to come along and meet some of the local user community. The result was typical of the type of synergy that we need to see more of--members of the PHP and Java communities being introduced to the platform, and members of the IBM i community realizing that there are resources that they can call on to aid them in their early explorations of these technologies.
There's a whole new world out there folks and it can help you maintain the vitality of the IBM i within your shops. Go check it out.
This is something to be thankful for. I'd like to think that here at Varsity Logistics, we maintain the vitality of IBM i within our shops.
http://www.varsitylogistics.com
Posted by: Alexandra Bettencourt | December 03, 2009 at 12:12 PM