i In The Sky

One of the barriers to developing applications for the IBM i has traditionally been the cost of the hardware and software. Indeed there's an on-going thread on the topic on LinkedIn that’s been running for more than two months. See “Developing for IBM i: Why Does It Need To Be So Hard?” if you’re interested.

If you’re a solo developer who wants to build a product, or perhaps an open-source offering, your choices were very limited. They were even more limited if your primary aim was to try "new stuff" that your current employer wasn’t interested in using on its system. Your options basically were to:

• Buy an old system at a reasonable price on e-Bay. But this limits you to old releases, so it’s not really an option for trying new stuff. Also, you often don't receive a legal license for the OS and the tools due to licensing changes made by IBM in recent years.
• If you’re a business partner, then you can purchase a system at a heavily discounted rate, but even this isn’t as attractive as it once was since IBM started charging for the compilers and some other tools that were previously free.

   
    If your need is short-term, you can make use of IBM's virtual loaner program. Our friend Aaron Bartell wrote about this earlier this year. The big problem here is that it’s only useful for a short-term project and (due to its requirement for VPN access) not usable for projects requiring access to outside Internet connections such as Web services.

Over the years many timeshare services have come and gone, but most severely limited what you could do, and/or ran on old releases. We used John Ross' Netshare400 for many years to run our website and tackle other work, but John now runs only a very limited timeshare service on a V5R2 system.

But now there’s an alternative (actually two) that keep the costs reasonable while providing access to the "latest and greatest" in software.

The first is Holger Scherer's site. A word of warning: when you go to the site, it will come up in German. Click on the UK flag in the top left of the browser window and then click on "AS/400 Accounts" to see the details in English. We’d give you a direct link to the English page, but this site uses frames (grrrrr - we hate frames!), so we can't. Holger offers free accounts on a V5R3 system and for-fee accounts on more current releases. The price gets higher as the release number gets bigger, which seems reasonable. Be aware the prices are in Euros; currently 1 Euro is worth about US $1.30. Don't pay attention to the exchange rates at the bottom of the Web page; they’re way out-of-date. You should, however, pay attention to the Value Added Tax (VAT) at 19 percent; that isn’t included in the price and you’ll be charged that if you live outside of Germany.

While Holger's site has been around for a few years, there's now a new kid in town run by our good friend Dr. Franken (aka Larry Bolhuis) and his sidekick Igor (aka Jim Oberholtzer). Known as iDevCloud, the site offers for-fee access to recent releases (V5R4, V6.1 and V7.1) and options for shared use or private partitions--your own private system in the cloud. iDevCloud doesn’t offer free access, but the prices charged are certainly much lower than the cost of running your own machine and having the good doctor and Igor take care of all your PTF and hardware issues is a major plus. One nice thing that iDevCloud has done is to seek out corporate sponsors. Currently Zend and ProData are making their software available on the site. Other vendors will be added to the list over time.

If you’ve been looking for a home for your pet software project, or simply want to hone your development skills to boost your resume, you now have some additional options.

Support these folks--it will benefit us all in the long run.

Comments

[Aaron Bartell]

Wanted to comment on iDevCloud because it has a twist in it that might catch people off guard. At the bottom of this page is a clause that states production workloads and commercial development cannot be done with the for-fee leases.

http://www.idevcloud.com/Menu.htm

This is of course imposed by IBM and not by our good friends Larry and Jim. I haven't ever worked in a shop where I wasn't allowed to "play" on a machine, so maybe paying $50/month for a single library that can't be used for production/commercial is a need and people are willing to pay.

It is very troubling to me that IBM can't get their heads out of their rear quarters (pardon my Norwegian) and put something together that will bolster new development on the IBM i so new ISV's can come on board easily. WHY NOT give a bunch of software to iDevCloud and make its use restriction-less for a 2 year period which should be a period long enough to get a new business up and running? They could still charge for it, but take off the restrictions.

The politics, even while they are attempting to do good things, are astounding. They need to allow some key individuals in IBM to do a few cowboy things so they can test the waters of different initiatives.

Players like Google are seeing the inadequacies of enterprise development and are beginning to address them with things like GoogleApp Engine. http://www.sdtimes.com/GOOGLE_APPENGINE_LOOKS_TO_WOO_ENTERPRISES/By_Alex_Handy/About_CLOUDCOMPUTING_and_GOOGLE/34550. I do believe the lines could be getting a littler thinner in regards to competition over integrated. We have had integrated on IBM i for decades and now others are starting to catch on by building their own stacks with open source and introducing proprietary where necessary.

IBM, we are running out of time.

AaronBartell.com
p.s. Sorry if this post is a little heated, but I had high hopes for "IBM i in the cloud" and put over one hundred donated hours into RPGUI (http://mowyourlawn.com/rpgui.html) this past year. RPGUI will still be of great value, but it is so darn hard to get it into people's hands (i.e. specifically non-IBM developers).

[Nathan Andelin]

The terms against commercial development are hard to believe. Indeed the hardware and software discounts under IBM's partner in development programs are designed to encourage commercial development. Why don't Larry and Jim just extend that type of license to others, perhaps under association agreements?

[Hans Boldt]

$50/month and I can't use it for commercial development?

(shakes head in disbelief)

For a years worth of that I can buy a pretty decent PC with no usage limitations.

Aaron: Sorry, but I think IBM's time ran out years ago.

[Aaron Bartell]

@Hans

And with the age of the internet it is quite easy to serve a site from your home internet connection which you are already paying for. Internet providers, at least the ones where I live, do very little to restrict you on the usage.

That is not to say hosting a business site on your home internet connection is a good idea (for a variety of reasons), but it is a solid place to start. It just would have been soooo nice to give people zero excuse to not pursue trying something new.

I think it would be great to give people free access to a library on an IBMi with all of the compilers at their disposal and a single instance of Apache that they have full control over. Give them 250MB of space, and require them to renew the service every month otherwise the account will expire. Then have a non-expiring-single-library account they can have for $20/mth, and then another tier where they can get an entire LPAR for $60/mth (roughly the going rate for a virtualized linux partition).

I see they have machines on eBay for very reasonable: http://cgi.ebay.com/IBM-AS-400e-9406-170-2290-Server-System-V5R3-10-4H72M-/370372576393?pt=COMP_EN_Servers&hash=item563bed0489#shId ($359 with OS). Shipping is $150. Not too bad, though it is a fairly old OS, but definitely workable.

AaronBartell.com

[Bruce Guetzkow]

Larry & Jim spoke at the WMCPA September meeting last week on the subject of iDevCloud. While you are correct that, at present, you cannot do production/development, they have indicated that they are working on getting to a point where those restrictions will no longer be in place. You'd be best checking with them on particulars, but suffice it to say that the plans are not just on paper. Their inroad to making iDevCloud happen was to push it as an educational experience (learn new IBM i techniques, try PHP when your company won't allow you to load it on your company box). In other words...stay tuned.

[Chris Vollstadt]

I have to agree with Aaron's first post. RPGUI is indeed a great initiative, but getting it to non- IBM i developers is difficult due to the limited access to the hardware. I use Google AppEngine to host a few demo web apps - some of which are at least conceived to be IBM i utilities, but that do not *actually* run on an i because I don't have the resources to access one. (http://cvollstadt.appspot.com in case anyone is interested).

How much do I pay for this? Nothing. How much did it cost to get started to play around? Nothing. Even the development tools were free.

(It's ironic that integrated stacks are now all the rage, when the i has had one for a long time. That one characteristic is always the first thing I tell people about the platform.)

Here's hoping that iDevCloud lowers the barrier to entry even more. I believe that the integrated nature of the i is its greatest strength and that it could make inroads in the development community if only they were given (if not free like GAE) but very low cost access to the platform.

[Dan Devoe]

What IBM is probably fearful of is companies not purchasing the development tools for use in their organization, and using a site such as this to do their compilations on.

From that point of view, I can partially understand it (partially because as you know, the IBM compilers are NOT cheap -- especially for shop buying a new machine with 6.1 or higher, who want to use both ILE & legacy compilers).

But for an independent contractor, the restriction is utterly insane. Perhaps the client they're working with has a very small window for the contractor to get onto their system.

I know if I was a customer, even though they may have a "test" environment, there is still a chance of library lists not being properly set when testing, etc., I would feel more comfortable with initial testing being done on another box.

Once again, red tape by Big Blue = strategic...