Looking Back at IBM i Application Development in 2011

It's that time of year when people traditionally look back over the past 12 months and attempt, perhaps, to extrapolate from that what might come to pass in the next 12. Problem is that if the past 12 months have taught us anything it is that we have no idea what may happen next! For a start we were convinced that long before now the IBM Rational would have realized the folly of its ways and removed the charges for RPG Open Access--no such luck. But at least there's a really strong rumor that we can expect to see that happen before the spring. Please, pretty please. We'd hate to be back here again next year bemoaning the fact that it didn't happen.

That said, time for a few words on some of the more interesting trends that have emerged over the year.

Free and Almost Free
Of particular note is the increase in the number of vendors in the iBM i space who now offer their products (or at least a base version of them) for free. Still others have abandoned the notion of charging for the software itself and instead simply charge for maintenance. This is a trend we expect to see continue, and indeed grow, over the coming months. We've already heard rumors of at least one vendor that's considering offering a free "community edition" of its product. If indeed that comes to pass it has the potential to significantly shake up at least one segment of the market. 

Mobile
Mobile this, mobile that. Some days we think we may scream if we hear the word just one more time. Luckily this is a trend that makes sense. Sure lots of folks are jumping on the bandwagon, but it does make perfect sense in many cases. In particular the availability of GPS capability in most mobile devices makes tracking the whereabouts of folks such as delivery drivers affordable for even the more modest-sized business. Knowing who is where and therefore being able to re-route them to make an emergency pick-up (for example) can increase efficiency and improve customer relations. We'll be having a mobile focus again this spring at the RPG & DB2 Summit, and we're hoping this time we'll have a chance to attend a few of the sessions ourselves. Now that we have both iOS devices (iPad and iPod touch) and an Android phone we’re more and more interested in what can be done with these little devils.

Upgrading Applications and Skills
This is a long overdue trend in our opinion. Admittedly as our business involves consulting and training on modernization topics we have a vested interest, but we're seeing more and more of clients looking to enhance the skills of their development teams and make the most of the application inventory they already have. An increasing demand exists to make IBM i data available to applications on other platforms. This is a welcome trend, because two or three years ago all we were seeing was folks busily exporting data from the IBM i, manipulating it on some other box and then re-importing it. Having the i remain at the heart of the process is good to see. This kind of updating makes sense in these tight economic times. Why not make the most of what you have--both in terms of personnel and applications.

We're still not seeing as many people actively modernizing their code base as we'd like. We still see far too much of the "if it ain't broke ..." mentality but perhaps in time. It has always been a mystery to us that rather than invest $x in re-engineering their software, management will pay $y (where y is typically 20 percent or so of x) over and over and over again. And for each iteration the cost of y rises and rises. Admittedly it's tough to quantify the cost/benefit of re-engineering. All we know is that, of those we have worked with, every single one wishes wish they'd done it sooner!

Did we miss some trends you've spotted? Let us know. In the meantime, we wish all of our readers a healthy and wealthy New Year.

New Tools, New Toys ...

In an earlier blog post we mentioned that Lansa had a new mobile-oriented app coming out that looked promising. Well LongReach has now been released, we've loaded it up on our iPad and from what we've seen so far it looks good. One of our clients had been "shopping" for a low-cost solution for document distribution to their mobile sales force. It looks like LongReach may fit that role nicely and at a price of $0, it certainly meets the low-cost criteria. We'll report back once we've had a bit more time to explore. One thing we will say though, the documentation that's installed on the iPad is a great improvement over that of most apps we've seen. Once we've had to use it in the heat of battle we'll be better able to comment on how useful it is in practice, but it looks good and appears to be comprehensive.

The only obvious downside that we can see is that it requires four (?) ports to be open on the firewall, so those of you who live under the sway of the local Mordac may have to usesome persuasion to get them opened up so you can give it a spin.

Another recent announcement, this time from Profound Logic is that their new workbench for Profound UI can be plugged in to RDP. That is great news for their users as they can now develop all of their RPG code within a single environment. Hopefully this will be a growing trend and we'll see more and more IBM i tool vendors take advantage of the RDP tool set.

We have a new toy in the family--our first smartphone. Since we are both Mac users and also have iPods and an iPad, it might surprise you that we don't already have an iPhone. Trouble is there is no cross-border data plan that we can use and to get an iPhone would require that we add a data plan at $50 a month to our already exorbitant monthly cross border plan. And that would not give us any data access while traveling in the U.S. That just seemed like too much money for too little functionality to us. So when we saw a Virgin Mobile pay-as-you-go Android phone on sale at Best Buy the other week for $75 including the first month, we figured why not give it a shot.

The good news is that we now have data access while in the U.S. and, for that matter, a backup GPS. We can even use Skype to call back to Canada (and it works very well we might add). The bad news is that we really don't like the Android interface in the Samsung model we have. We know different phone manufacturers have different Android implementations, but this one is just not very intuitive. We may not have an iPhone but on those occasions when we have borrowed one, we found it very easy and intuitive to use. Same for the iPad and iPod touch, which we do have. At least this version of Android just doesn't cut it. We know we have many Android fans among our friends, but we can't help feeling it is the ability to code for it in Java and not have to pay a developer license fee to Apple that is the main attraction--it's hard to believe it's the user interface!