i Advocates, Unite!

In November, we wrote about our first iAdvocate Tutorial session. We’ve just finished our spring 2013 RPG & DB2 Summit, which contained our second iAdvocate session.

As with the one in October, the iAdvocate session was a hit. We were better prepared this time with more chairs in the room - good thing, since most of them were full! We even had some of the members of the local Atlanta IBM i users group (recently renamed from AMCU to iTAC) stop by to join in the conversation.

There were again many good points made. Someone asked where the younger developers for this platform are. We’ve asked that question a few times as well and explored a few potential answers. Of course, a look around the room showed that a larger than usual number of younger developers were present at the Summit this time. One of those spoke up and said that his shop has around 30 IBM i developers under the age of 30.

So we’re making progress! If that shop can do it, so can others. Mike led a discussion about investing in creating your own IBM i developers - trained in your own philosophy and practices. As Mike said “Give somebody a break . . . Start mentoring someone new.”

Aaron Bartell reminded us that if we want to attract younger developers, we need to make sure we’re doing modern things in our shops. “If I walked into a shop where people are still on V5R3, using columnar RPG and not using RDP for editing, I’d keep walking.” Well said, Aaron!

There was even more lively discussion on what Mike calls the “positive feedback loop” - singing the praises of our platform within the shop. Sometimes our system and its reliability and capability are taken for granted because no one ever hears about it. It sits there quietly running our core business applications smoothly and efficiently. But too often when it comes to some new whiz-bang BI or Web or mobile application, IBM i is not the first platform that comes to mind as the host - perhaps it’s not considered at all.

Mike gave many concrete suggestions on how to change that. One is to demonstrate that you care about the business and that you (and i) can help by scheduling time with a company business executive and asking him or her “What keeps you up at night?” Then go away and think about what you (and i) may be able to do to help alleviate the biggest concerns of the executives in your shop.

Get in a position to lead rather than wait for someone to come and ask you for something - because they may not ask you for it; they may ask someone else. And that’s how these other (inferior) platforms work their way into IBM i shops.

In this discussion, one of our favorite suggestions was that we put up a sign in each IBM i shop - similar to the safety signs that sometimes appear on factory floors - “NN days without an accident” - that says “IBM i has gone NNNN days with no unscheduled downtime.” Of course, we’ll need to allow for a much larger number of digits than most of those similar signs!

Mike challenged us to change the discussion - don’t ask Why i? - rather ask “Why not i?”

You can see the slides that Mike used to lead the iAdvocate discussion as well as many other resources, such as case studies and independent research papers on our iAdvocate page.

Mentoring and More

We were particularly pleased to see the comments to our blog two weeks ago on training new RPG programmers. It's always gratifying to know that you are not the only people in the world who think that educating our replacements is a good idea. Maybe some of you want to work forever--not us--we have many things we'd like to do.

Among the comments was one from Torbjörn Appehl who mentioned that in Sweden a company named Tieto had recently undertaken a program to train young recruits in the joys of RPG. We mentioned this story last year in our blog, but at the time didn't know the name of the company, etc. Now, thanks to Torbjörn, we have been able to look at the company's website and we highly recommend you to pay a visit too. This is a company to be watched. If you don't live in one of the countries Tieto serves, you're forgiven for going off and weeping quietly in a corner as you bemoan the state of IT companies in North America and probably elsewhere.

So many companies seem content to simply deal with resource shortages by outsourcing, which is not only a short-term solution, but also one that in our opinion is also shortsighted. Do we really want our children to be the hewers of wood and and drawers of water for the rest of the world because we were not willing to invest in them? On the Tieto website pay attention to the mention of mentoring programs and other similar investments the company makes. Do you know of anyone in North America doing that? Or are most, as we suspect, simply bemoaning the skills shortage, which is not just an IBM i and RPG issue, and doing nothing about it.

This issue is fresh in our minds as it came up during the roundtable discussion that opened the annual WMPCA Spring Conference, which we are attending this week. Present at the meeting were a number of present and former students of our friend Jim Buck, who we mentioned in the earlier blog entry. Some of them described the importance of mentoring and internship programs to their success and how hard such opportunities were to come by. Jim is currently working on ways of extending the reach of his programs and we hope to work with him on that. Something needs to happen.

Another comment on the blog came from Christian in France who works for a French training company that runs introductory IBM i and RPG training two or three times a year for clients whose companies have recruited young programmers. We were particularly pleased to see Christian's comments regarding modern programming practices and tooling.

In part he said: "Of course, we use SQL and free RPG, even if we have to talk about DDS and fixed form RPG. Our tools are system i Navigator and RDP, no choice!..."

"As you can see, it is possible to teach 'IBM i', it's a wonderful system with many advantages that can be interesting for young people, but we have to show them the 'sunny side'."

The "sunny side" indeed Christian! No young programmer in their right mind is going to be interested in RPG II style fixed-format coding and SEU. You'll be lucky if you keep them for a month, even if they are an unpaid intern! Show them modern RPG and RDP and you'll find a very different response.

Thanks also to the others who commented on the blog. We really appreciate your feedback.

Another point that came up during this evening's discussion was that most IBM i programmers aren't just programmers. They're really business analysts that implement the results of their analysis in RPG. This in some ways reinforces the point we made about retraining experienced business people and teaching them how to program. It was the way Jon's father broke into programming and we know many other people whose entry into the world of computing took a similar path. Now if only we could work out a way to make that happen on a large enough scale to make a dent in unemployment levels and the RPG programmer shortage that would be progress!

RDP Plug-ins

As you know, we’re big fans of RSE and its related tools found originally in WDSC and more recently in RDP. There are many, many features that come in that toolset directly from IBM—so many that we keep learning new ones all the time. But as many things as are there, there is still a long list of nice-to-have features that aren’t there. We published a wish list some time ago about some of the additions we’d like to see. Some of these have since become available and many more are on IBM’s RFE (Request For Enhancement) list.

The fact that these tools are built on Eclipse means that it’s not always necessary to wait for IBM to implement a feature. Eclipse was built from the ground up to allow developers to plug their own features directly into the toolset. Fortunately, many people have done just that. More fortunately still, many of these plug-ins are available for free.

We want to share just a few examples of some of the plug-ins with some specific IBM i functionality that we are aware of. We haven’t personally tried many of these plug-ins yet, but perhaps some of you have. If so, we hope you’ll let us know (via the comments) how you like them. Also please let us know about plug-ins that we’ve missed. We’re sure there are many more out there. Please help us add to the list.

Many software companies have plug-ins that interface to their (usually) host-based software. Examples of these include many of the source control or change management products, such as those from Arcad, PTC (formerly MKS), Aldon and SoftLanding. In addition, there are plug-ins that interface to tools such as DBU from ProData and Surveyor from Linoma and probably many more. If you use the corresponding software on the host, these plug-ins can provide a great way to integrate your editing environment with that software.

For our purposes here, we’re interested more in tools that are more generic in nature that don’t require other software (other than RDP or WDSC, of course) to be installed to make use of them.

Are you frustrated by the limitations of RDP’s Templates and Snippets? Someone on the WDSC-L list on Midrange.com was and developed a plug-in with much more robust template functionality called FreeMarker. If this sounds interesting to you, visit this site for more information or to download that tool.

Several other people on the same list use the QuantumDB plug-in for database access. It is not written specifically for IBM i but does work with DB2 for i. For more information, see this site.

We mentioned Arcad Software’s tools related to their products above. They also offer some generic tools for RSE users that do not relate to nor require installation of their products. They have a 5250 emulator plug-in. And their latest tool is a Data Area Editor plug-in. You can get more information and fill in a request for download of these free tools here.

SoftLanding also offers a generic set of tools called RSE Extensions Plug-in. It offers several utilities, including a spooled file viewer (it was created before RDP had its own and still has some advantages over the “native” one), a message queue monitor, a Data Area editor and tool to display Data Queues. You can get more information and download the tool here. We noticed that the website says the latest version is verified through RDP 8.0, so if, like us, you’re already on 8.5, you may want to check around, perhaps on the Midrange list archives, to see if others have experience with it at that level.

The newest set of plug-ins for RDP that we’ve seen is from Germany. There are two plug-ins from Task Force IT Consulting GmbH. One is a version of the TN5250J Emulator that lets you run an emulation session within the workbench. The other is a set of tools called iSphere. iSphere contains a Message File Editor, a Binding Directory Editor and a Compare/Merge Editor for source members.

We’ve just installed iSphere and we’ll be reporting on our progress with using it in our next EXTRA article, which will be available in two weeks. So if that one sounds interesting to you, take a look out for that. You can subscribe to the free IBM i EXTRA newsletter here. If you don’t want to wait for that and want to try out iSphere for yourself, take a look at it here.