Educating ... Jon (Among Others)

Educating ... Jon (among others)

This week we want to cover two topics related to education. The first relates to education in the formal sense, the second to that gained in the school of hard-knocks.

Back in our Oct. 25 blog post ("IT Must Be Magic") we continued a discussion on the shortage of young people entering the IT field. Those of you interested in the topic should check out part of an InfoWorld article titled, "11 programming trends to watch." The whole article is well worth reading, but the section headed "Programming trend No. 8: Traditional education fades from relevance" really grabbed our attention. Until we read this we had thought that hijacking talented high schoolers en route to university was something that only happened in the sporting world. Apparently not. It seems that some high-tech firms are actively pursuing the same approach. Interesting.

The article also references a Fast Company piece titled, "Silicon Valley's New Hiring Strategy." Has this approach been triggered by the shortage of IT grads or has experience simply shown that a degree in IT doesn't really prove that you can program in today's fast moving world?

This weekend Jon was doing some work with embedded SQL and had an "interesting" time debugging problems with one particular program. It hasn't done anything to improve his love/hate relationship with SQL, but he can explain why himself:

Susan has always been our in-house SQL person, but I've been doing more and more of it lately, particularly in PHP. I've also been using more and more of it in my RPG code. I want to like SQL--I really do. I have long been convinced that it's the right way to go--not for everything, but certainly for set retrieval and processing. I still have a gag reflex when faced by some of its more arcane syntax, but I am fighting that. Then just when SQL was starting to win me over ...

The embedded SQL query I was building was a simple one. Just a straight SELECT with a simple WHERE clause. In the past I've often done such trivial retrievals with a SELECT * into a DS defined by referencing the external file definition. But while I was building this particular one I found myself hearing the voice of IBM's Mike Cain telling me not to waste time retrieving data I didn't need. OK, I thought, I'll be a good boy and SELECT just the columns I need and specify them in the DS--how hard can it be?

Problem was I didn't get the DS right. I was tired and simply reversed a couple of fields. As a result the values I was seeing made no sense. Now I could swear that when I've done something foolish like that in the past the SQL pre-compiler berated me and told me that the structure was not usable. Not this time. Not a word--even though one of the fields was alpha and the other numeric. It seems to me that changes made in SQL in general, and the pre-compiler in particular, in recent years have allowed it to do a lot of implicit casting between different data types. I can only conclude that in that light IBM has relaxed the validation rules. Either that or my brain has gone completely to mush and I am mismembering the "olden days."

I was clearly having a bad day as I also accidentaly discovered that the pre-compiler doesn't issue an error if you specify a column name in a SELECT clause that doesn't even exist in the table in question. The result is an SQL 42703 error at runtime. At least the error message was explicit about the cause of the problem. Maybe I've never made that mistake before, but it really surprised me that the pre-compiler didn't catch it, particularly since earlier it had failed a compile because the table in question was not found in the library list.

What's the point of all this? Other than to demonstrate my own apparent incompetence? Basically I want to warn others not to make too many assumptions about what potential problems the pre-compiler will or will not diagnose. Sometimes our dear old RPG compiler spoils us and lulls us into a false sense of security!

What We Are Thankful For

We live in Canada and consequently our Thanksgiving was in a few weeks ago. However, as in most years, we were working in the U.S. that day, so we tend to celebrate in November. So as we near the Thanksgiving celebration, our thoughts turn to things we are particularly thankful for.

We have many personal things we are thankful for. These include our health (including our wonderful Canadian healthcare system), our families (including four exceptional grandchildren), our home (which we sometimes wish we could spend more time in than we do), and many more things that we could go on for hours listing. We are truly blessed.

But in this post, we thought we'd concentrate on those things related to our work with IBM i that we're particularly thankful for.

First of all, we're grateful to still have work and a good income, despite the state of the economy. We know many who are not so fortunate. Many IBM i shops seem to have decided that an uncertain economy is a good time to exploit their investment in existing applications by moving them forward, enhancing their applications' value and the developers' productivity. That just happens to be our specialty, so it has worked out well for us.

We're grateful that the developers of our favorite programming language--RPG--have never even considered resting on their laurels. They could have simply cashed in on the maintenance revenue stream for applications running the businesses of thousands of companies worldwide. Instead, they have continually made the language more modern (/Free, data structure enhancements), more powerful (native XML processing, enhanced file handling), and especially recently, more easily expandable (via RPG Open Access or OA--more on OA in a moment)

We thank our lucky stars every day for RSE (the toolset currently packaged in RDP, earlier in RDi and WDSC). It's almost painful to recall our days of SEU development, with DSPFFD to get externally described field names and spooled compiler listings to find compile errors (shudder!).

And we're delighted that Rochester has given us a new friend to play with by embracing PHP on our favorite platform. If nothing else, PHP allows us to breathe a sigh of relief that we don't have to keep beating our heads against the Java brick wall. PHP gives us another option for a modern, browser-oriented language environment that lets us use OO to the extent we choose and offers an amazing wealth of open-source tools and applications. All with relatively simple integration to RPG applications and IBM i function. And best of all, it makes sense to those of us with RPG brains.

We said we'd come back to RPG OA. That's simply so that we can remind you that it was about a year ago that we made a plea for rational thought (pun intended) to prevail related to the Ts and Cs for OA. We have seen some progress. A trial version is available, at last. But we're still waiting for the true solution that we still hope will come--OA support to be included free-of-charge with either the OS or the RPG compiler. We have read rumors to the effect that we may not have much longer to wait for this. It would make a really nice present to find wrapped up under our Christmas tree!

Most of all, we're simply thankful to have had the opportunity to make a career working on the best platform on the planet for business applications.

Last, but by no means least, we're very thankful to all the readers of this blog. When the IBM Systems Magazine folks asked us to begin writing this some years ago, our first reaction was "but who would want to read what we have to say every week?"  Well, apparently, quite a few of you would. We're gratified and humbled at the number of you reading our weekly posts. Thank you all.

And a very happy Thanksgiving to all--whether in the USA or elsewhere--we all have a lot to be thankful for.

You're Fired!

Whenever we meet people at conferences or when conducting on-site training, invariably some discussion ensues about the future of RPG and/or the IBM i itself. Often the talk revolves around threats to the future of the platform within a particular organization. These discussions often leave us somewhat saddened by the attitudes expressed by participans and even more saddened by the attitudes of the management who have ground down their spirits.

We were trying to think of how we could highlight our feelings in the blog this week when we came upon a fascinating article by G. Michael Maddock and Raphael Louis Vitón in Businessweek. The title of the piece "Three Types of People to Fire Immediately" caught our attention. The basic thrust of the piece is that in order for a culture of innovation to thrive, it's necessary to take steps to remove any barriers to the development of that culture. This is nicely summed up in the opening quote from an unnamed CEO: "I wanted a happy culture. So I fired all the unhappy people."

This had particular appeal to Jon, who forms the "bad cop" half of our team and who has long believed that too many good go-ahead RPGers are out there to waste time on the ones that don't want to do or learn anything new.

We'll leave you to read the article for yourselves; it is well worth your time.

The authors categorize the three "should be fired" groups under the headings of "Victims," "Nonbelievers" and "Know-It-Alls." You won't have to read very far to recognize members of your own company within these ranks. Hopefully you won't recognize yourself--but if you do, it's not too late. If you haven't yet been fired there's still time to change!
 
We're not quite sure into which group the "green screen is good enough ..." crowd fits or indeed where the "If it ain't broke ..." chorus members belong. Perhaps none of the three. They are perhaps at an earlier stage with hope yet remaining?

Got any more groups you'd like to add to the collection? We'd love to hear your take on this.

ISVs Offer Free Community Versions of Their Software

PHP has undoubtedly had a huge impact in the IBM i marketplace, but one aspect of that influence has come as something of a surprise--the arrival of free community edition versions of commercial software offerings.

In the PHP world it is often open-source offerings that are available in these editions, but in the IBM i world it turns out traditional ISVs have been exploring this approach to marketing their products. Early arrivals on the scene included System & Method's Icebreak Inspire, CNX's Valence and looksoftware's ilook. Other vendors are also reported to be offering their products free-of-charge if you sign a maintenance contract. Quite a change from a few years ago.

Judging from discussions we've had with some of these vendors, this approach is working for them, so it wasn't too surprising to see the announcement this week of yet another free offering.

This time it is PlanetJ's WOW that is being offered in a free community edition. We've mentioned WOW before in articles on application modernization and have always been impressed by its capabilities and ease-of-use. Now that this free version is available we expect to see its use become far more widespread. One interesting aspect of PlanetJ's approach is that while the product is free, they do offer a $99 "Quick Start" bundle which includes some online assistance to ensure you get off to a good start--sounds like a bargain to us.

Much as we'd like to, though, we won't be trying this latest version of WOW for ourselves for a while because the initial release runs on Tomcat in Windows. It can target DB2 for i data, but since it can also access SQL Server and MySQL databases, perhaps this Windows requirement shouldn't be surprising--just disappointing for those of us who prefer to avoid Windows.

But good news! The good folks at PlanetJ tell us that versions to run natively on IBM i under both Tomcat, WebSphere or (better yet) under the Integrated App Server, will shortly be available. Anything you develop using the Windows version can be easily ported to the IBM i once those are available. So if you use Windows, you can play today and be ready to impress your management with what your i can do.

We've heard rumors that at least one other IBM i ISV is thinking seriously about introducing a free edition so we'll watch out for that.

We live in interesting times!

MySQL Is Back as Zend DBi!

In January  we blogged about Oracle giving the cold shoulder to the IBM i world by announcing they would no longer be supplying a compiled IBM i version of MySQL. Today we have an update on that subject, at long last.

MySQL became popular among IBM i shops because of the popularity of PHP on i. While PHP certainly doesn't require MySQL, many open-source PHP applications that have caught on in IBM i shop (e.g., Joomla, Drupal and SugarCRM) are written to use it. Indeed SugarCRM has become so popular among i shops that they have produced an IBM i specific version. The availability of the DB2 for i Storage Engine for MySQL also made it easier to integrate those applications with more traditional IBM i applications and databases.

Back in January, we speculated that IBM and Zend were in discussions about a potential solution to the uncertainty caused by Oracle's actions. Now, we finally have an answer. Zend has agreed to step up to creating, maintaining and shipping compiled versions of the MySQL code to run on IBM i.

Zend has decided to call this distribution Zend DBi--we don't understand why, really. But not to worry, the intention is that the code that runs on IBM i coming from Zend will be the same as MySQL on other platforms. Zend will simply be compiling and packaging the pieces. Required code changes will be made available to the MySQL open-source project as required under the terms of the GNU GPL license.

Zend will distribute the new Zend DBi code as part of Zend Server and will also make it available for download by IBM i shops as a stand-alone package, much as we had downloaded MySQL from the Oracle in the past. And the storage engine that helps to integrate MySQL with DB2 for i will continue to be supported and made available by the DB2 for i folks in Rochester.

So it came to pass as we predicted it would; it just took a little longer than we had thought it might. Hmmm, it seems the idea was conceived in January and arrived in October. That's about the right gestation period. Welcome to the world, Zend DBi!