Exploring Open Access for RPG

Although we’ve had the details of Rational Open Access for RPG (OAR) for awhile now, we hadn’t had the time to explore it in the depth that we’d like. That changed recently and we’ve just wrapped up an article for the upcoming issue of IBM EXTRA that walks you through the creation of a simple OAR handler. It launches July 21. To subscribe to IBM EXTRA, go here.

All of the focus with OAR has been on the Web-GUI front, but as we've noted before, we think that it has great potential in other areas. As a result, for our first effort we chose to write a handler to generate IFS files. Our example doesn't do anything that couldn't have been done by an RPG program directly called the IFS APIs, or indeed that generated a work file and then invoked CPYTOSTMF to create the IFS file. But there's an elegant simplicity in being able to write directly to the IFS by adding a keyword to the F-spec for the file and using your normal write operations.

We were pleasantly surprised to find how easy it was to code the handler once we’d figured out the basic mechanics. The fact that the data is already in human-readable form was a big plus as it avoids the necessity of decoding packed decimal and binary fields. For many, the biggest challenge will be the fact that almost everything (and we mean everything) involves the use of basing pointers. OAR passes you a single parameter and the vast majority of the items in that structure are the basing pointers to the various fields and structures that you need to access. Luckily, you don't need to do any pointer manipulation, but you should be completely comfortable with the use of based structures - if you know that the rest is a breeze.

The only other thing that you should be familiar with is the use of nested-data structures and qualified data names, but then you all know about those already, right? Of course, we could’ve made the handler more complex. One obvious addition would be to optionally output an initial record containing the field names as column headings. Another would be to allow the user program to specify things such as the field delimiters (e.g., tabs instead of commas, single quotes instead of double, etc.), end-of-record characters and the code page for the IFS file. Implementing these isn’t rocket science, but it does hint at the level of complexity that’d be required should one decide to write their own 5250 handler!

We’ll be working on other handlers soon and hope to see others publish their own efforts. Much can be done, but the code won't write itself!

If you have any suggestions for handlers that you think would be useful, please let us know via the comments. We'd rather spend time on routines that will be useful to others than just play around for the fun of it.

As it happens, Susan will be teaching OAR at the Ocean User Group conference on Friday of this week. If you live in the area and haven't already booked for the event, come and join us! If you're already registered we look forward to seeing you there.

What are YOU concerned about?

When it comes to IBM i, we have many things we’re concerned about. We’re programmers and teachers, so our concerns tend to be oriented around those areas. As it turns out, we're not alone.

COMMON Europe organizes a "Top Concerns" survey each year and traditionally announces the results of the survey at its annual meeting. Even though the survey is organized by COMMON Europe, the respondents aren’t limited to its members. Our friend, Ranga Deshpande (who is from Belgium, one of our all-time favorite countries!), organizes the Top Concerns survey, but he worked with another friend, Ron Newman, to encourage participation from COMMON North America members. About 24 percent of the responses were from the Americas and 65 percent were from Europe, along with a few responses from Africa and Australasia.

So why do we say we're not alone in our concerns? Well, the concern that moved from fifth place last year to second place this year was "keep the skills current for existing staff." This topic is dear to our hearts! Not only is it in the list of the top concerns for IBM i shops, it’s apparently becoming more important than ever.

Too often we hear from programmers in IBM i shops they’re really struggling to update their skills, often with little or no help from their companies. We recently had a discussion with yet another developer who’s looking to pay for his own education on his own time because his employer can't (or won't) fit it into the budget or into the work schedule.

We’ve opined about this in the past. At each of the RPG & DB2 Summit events we've held to date, we've heard from attendees who’ve paid for their own registration and travel costs because their companies won’t pay. Sometimes they even have to take vacation time to attend because the company won't even allow the time to update their skills.

Maybe, just maybe, the concern about keeping skills of IT staff current seems to be rising to the top of the "Top Concerns" list is a sign that companies are beginning to see the value of education. We can dream, can't we?

Of course, this concern of ours is more than a little self-serving, since our primary business is education. In addition to our ongoing private, on-site class offerings and conference education (our own Summit conference, as well as participating in many LUG events), we’re just now embarking on what’s a new venture for us--we're offering some online courses this summer. If you're interested in checking those out, take a look here.

In case you're wondering about what the other top concerns from the survey were, here are a few near the top of the list. First was "satisfy internal customers," which makes sense, since our internal customers typically pay our IT budgets! 

In third place is "attract the younger generation to IBM i on Power Systems (System i or AS/00),” which is also a concern of ours and one with which our friends involved with YiPs are helping.

There are 12 other Top Concerns in the survey, along with a few "write-in" concerns that weren’t on the list of concerns for voting, including "Modernize/webify/Native GUI applications" (apparently Aaron isn't alone in his concerns, either). Check out the entire "Top Concerns" list.

So, what are YOU concerned about? Let us know via the comments!

Easter Treats are Coming ... Just a Little Late

We hope all of our followers had a happy Easter, or for those who don’t celebrate Easter, as beautiful a weekend as we had here in Toronto. Perhaps the Easter Bunny didn't leave any treats for our fellow RPGers, but who knows--maybe we'll get a few treats soon, in the form of some cool new features for our favorite language. The pundits we've read have indicated that IBM i 7.1 announcements may happen as early as next week.

While IBM/Rational announcements related to IBM i are always interesting to us, this announcement promises to be particularly intriguing. We've already heard (and reported here) some news of one feature we're anticipating. Back then, it was referred to generically as "RPG Open I/O," but of course, we all know how much the IBM/Rational people like to play with names, so we're expecting a different name. We've seen reports that it will be called "Open Access," but who knows what the actual name will be. You never know--we might be pleasantly surprised at some cool, clever and/or catchy name it gets. Hey, it could happen--there's a first time for everything!

We also understand that many ISVs haven’t only been disclosed on this new feature, but have also been able to work with early versions of the support and are producing some really cool tools that take advantage of it. We saw a fascinating demo recently of a tool from one vendor that has taken it even further than we thought would be possible, especially in the short period of time they’ve had to work on it. The next few months should be interesting.

As exciting as that "Open Access" feature may be, we've also been told that there are a number of other goodies that the RPG compiler developers have been working on. We have so many items on our own "RPG wish lists," we can hardly wait to see if any of them will be fulfilled in 7.1.  We expect that, as in many past releases, Barbara Morris and her team of compiler developers will have come up with some cool new features that never even made it to our own wish lists, but that we'll probably be wondering why we didn't think of asking for them!

So stay tuned, RPGers, for some slightly delayed Easter treats coming your way from IBM and Rational. With luck we can give you a few more details in next week's blog.

The first event where we expect to be able to speak intelligently about these new RPG features in public is across the pond. We're both speaking at the "Power Shift" event in Manchester, United Kingdom, on April 22nd at the City of Manchester Stadium, the home of Manchester City football club (aka soccer for our North American readers). We were at this event last year and found many forward-thinking IBM i devotees among the attendees. We're looking forward to the event and having a chance to reunite with some of the friends we met last year. If you’re in the United Kingdom, come on up to Manchester for the day. We'll be talking about the RPG announcements as well as Rational Developer for Power Systems, Open Source on i, PHP and MySQL and there are many other sessions on IBM i and Power Systems. Check here for more info. At 90 GBP for the day, it's quite a bargain.

Updates and News Tidbits

A few "bits and pieces" this week.

First a follow up to last week's blog. In that post we said IBM's Hayden Lindsay stated that IBM was "willing to look at porting [RDP] to Linux or Mac if they get enough requests for it." To which we added "So send in those cards and letters!" Well, a number of people have asked just exactly how they could do this, so we asked IBM.

Many thanks to Don Yantzi, product manager for Rational Tools for Power Systems, from the Toronto lab, who came up with this link. It's not Dons' fault, but when we followed the link we were very disappointed to find that you can't actually submit requests from this page without entering your customer number. We have no problem identifying ourselves on any such requests, but we don't have a customer number, and neither do many of the other developers like ourselves who work on a number of systems. But does the fact that we can't supply a customer number really mean that we don't have any good product ideas? Come on IBM, it really ought to be easier than this.

One of the comments to our blog entry came from Mike Rydzewski, who asked how the changes impacted HATS and if HATS was now a plug-in.  According to Don: "HATS is a runtime license, so the HATS toolkit itself is free. However the HATS toolkit requires a Rational IDE product with the Web tools and WebSphere Test Environment. This is primarily either Rational Application Developer (RAD) or Rational Business Developer (RBD). RDi / RD Power on it's own does not have the necessary Web tools." So, good and bad news at the same time there for Mike. He doesn't have to pay for the HATS development tools, but he will have to buy another Rational tool in order to use those tools.

On the open-source front: we'll be filling in a few gaps from our earlier blog on the topic in a week or two, but in the meantime the latest news from CNX caught our attention. They're now offering a free, fully functional, Community Edition of their Valence Web-application software. The concept is an interesting one. You can develop your applications using the Valence tools completely free of charge, but prior to deploying them in a production environment you must either: buy a developer license or contribute your application code to the Valence community. An interesting concept to be sure; it will be interesting to see how other vendors in the RPG Web-application marketplace react to this change. For sure we'll be giving the tool a test drive. We certainly like what we've seen of it so far.

On the community front, and at the risk of sounding self-serving ... Together with our colleagues at System i Developer, we're offering a number of scholarships for the upcoming RPG and DB2 Summit in Fort Worth, Texas. The program is called EDiT (Education for Developers in Transition) and aims to assist IBM i programmers who are currently unemployed and therefore can't afford to attend many educational events. This is a formalization of something we've being doing on a more limited scale informally for a while now, and we hope it will help a few folks to "polish up" their resumes and give their job-hunting efforts a boost. If you know anyone who may qualify, please direct them here.

That's all from us for this week. Bye for now.

 

We are Not Alone

This week, we're at another gathering of the i faithful, this time in Vegas for DevCon. In a lively discussion session this afternoon, several interesting topics arose.

First up was the topic of education of a new generation of IBM i developers. From the panel, we discussed the great things that the IBM Academic Initiative is doing to help schools enlighten students about what IBM i can do. The panel members also challenged the audience members to do their part by providing internships or indeed by hiring the younger generation when they graduate.

Even though these youngsters have no practical experience, what they do have is knowledge, enthusiasm and a willingness to learn how to apply what they have learned in school. While students who have participated in schools that offer IBM i curriculum specifically may have a lot to offer, don't shortchange a bright young candidate who can easily be taught IBM i and/or RPG. We raised the point that as long as you introduce these youngsters to the latest form of RPG (i.e., Subprocesure and /Free-form) most, no matter if their background is Java, PHP or .Net, will readily embrace the language. Indeed those with a leaning towards business programming may end up preferring it. This is another of our "soapbox" beliefs, and it was good to find that others on the panel shared our feelings on the subject.

One attendee shared that her company had helped to get an IBM i curriculum started in a nearby local community college and challenged others to consider doing the same. Sometimes, it may take simply letting your local school know that there are jobs waiting for those who graduate with those skills. Interestingly a great many community and junior colleges actually run their administration system on IBM i, and yet few teach it.  Do they fear students will hack into their grades and fees, perhaps?

It was exciting to hear about what some of the attendees are doing with their applications, applying many of the skills and techniques we've been spending the last several years teaching and encouraging--modularizing and modernizing their applications, adding new front ends, or making their code available as Web services. Some of the stories are truly inspiring. One woman is a single-person development shop, yet she has managed to successfully implement modularized code with subprocedures and service programs while keeping up with users' ever-challenging demands. Some young developers among the attendees have done some amazingly creative things while combining RPG and PHP; in one case, at least, in spite of the active discouragement on the part of his apparently short-sighted management. Fortunately, his end users were sufficiently thrilled with the results that his innovative work continues.

Anyone who says this platform is old or boring just hasn't been around the inspired developers we have seen in the last few weeks. This platform may have been around a long time compared to others, but from the looks of the things modern IBM i developers are doing today, we're just getting warmed up.

Good News? or Don't Go Wasting My Time With 'Good News'--I Just Want to Whine!

What exactly does the IBM i community want? 

For years we've listened as people complained that customers were moving off the platform and that there were no new customers. So as part of his new You and i blog IBMer Craig Johnson recently posted details of several new IBM i customers. Did people stand up and cheer? Nope. Most of the public expressions that we saw (at least on the Midrange-L list were predominantly negative. Even when others pointed out that they too had seen an upsurge in new customers in their businesses, the reaction was lukewarm at best.

Elsewhere Chris Maxcer recently blogged about essential skills for the modern IBM i developer. One of the comments included the phrase that "Now IBM is deprecating the (sic) RPG" as part of a very negative post. When Jon responded that there was no sign that IBM were doing anything of the sort he was asked "Which planet have you been vacation (sic) on ..."--apparently not the same one as the commenter!

Last week Jeff Olen announced that he was starting iManifest United States, an equivalent to the iManfest groups that have started in Asia Pacific and Europe, as we previously reported. Did he get a "Hooray, it's about time" from the assembled masses? Nope. For the most part the initial reactions were once again in the "Why bother, we're all doomed" category. Many of the negative reactions that we saw came from people that make their living selling services into this market place. Personally we're thrilled to see any initiative that might help improve our business prospects but apparently not everyone feels that way.

Maybe the overall economy is grinding everybody down. It has certainly resulted in a complete breakdown of civility (and common sense for that matter) in the U.S. political arena--but probably the less said about that the better. At least here in Canada the economy is showing signs of turning around. Job losses appear to be slowing. House prices in and around Toronto are rising, and in many areas have recovered most, if not all, of their previous decline. Admittedly, mostly because of stronger banking regulation, things never got quite as bad here as in the U.S., but our economies are so tied that we're still badly affected. As Pierre Trudeau once famously said on the subject of Canada/U.S. relations:

"Living next to you is in some ways like sleeping with an elephant. No matter how friendly and even-tempered is the beast, if I can call it that, one is affected by every twitch and grunt." 

In the U.S. there are also many signs of recovery. The most obvious one to us being that we are starting to see more interest in our services. Even more dramatic is that enrollments in our RPG and DB2 Summit conference in Minneapolis in October already substantially exceed the number who attended in Orlando in the spring.

But all of this sounds horribly like good news--and that's not too popular right now so we'd better stop before we depress too many people.

And just to pre-empt the inevitable questions, yes much of this was written slightly tongue-in-cheek, and no we don't wear rose-colored glasses.

Management by Myopia

A recent forum post on tool usage got Jon thinking about the role of the manager this week and in particular the negative effect on productivity bad (or at least misguided) management can have.

Now we're not necessarily talking about bad management in the sense of Dilbert's pointy-haired boss. Rather we're talking about a breed that seems rather too prevalent in the IBM I community--the "If I can't understand it you can't do it" brigade.

Many of these seem to have risen up through the programming ranks but along the road they got stuck in the 1980s (1990s?) as far as their technical skills are concerned. While that in and of itself can be a little dangerous, its real impact on the business comes when the manager uses his/her own lack of technical expertise as a throttle on developers.

Case in point. Some former students once wrote to us to proudly announce that they had just completed their first "real" RPG IV application based on modular construction methods and making full use of subprocedures. A few weeks later they wrote again saying that their manager had taken over maintenance of the application during a vacation period and had converted it all to RPG400 (yes, RPG400!). Why? Because he claimed he "couldn't understand all that RPG IV stuff." The more logical minded among you will note that in order to convert the code to RPG400 (as opposed to a total rewrite) the manager had to determine what the RPG IV code did, so saying that he didn't understand it was a non-sequitur. But then if he had been rational and logical he wouldn't have done it in he first place!

The example that sparked this blog entry, however, concerned a programmer who was complaining that SDA (the old green-screen design tool) added comments to his source and changed the date fields. During the ensuing discussion it became apparent that some of the programmers involved in the discussion were prevented by their management from using SDA for this very reason. Since the same "problems" apply to the Screen Designer in CODE and the new one in WDSc/RDi--assumedly these individuals would also be banned from using those too--despite the truly massive productivity gains that can be made by using such tools.

The real problem of course is not in the tool itself but rather in the reliance of the shop in using an outmoded methodology for change control and audit purposes. And that is where the manager comes in again. Stuck back in the past with his memories of the tools he used to use he perhaps remains oblivious to the possibilities of upgrading the tools his staff uses.

Interestingly, these same managers are often charged with managing a group of Web developers--be it .Net or PHP or Java or ... and it never seems to occur to them that those developers aren't reliant on change dates embedded in the source lines of their programs. Yet miraculously they seem to handle source change auditing and version roll-backs, etc., quite nicely. How do they manage that? Invariably by using the appropriate change management and version control tools for the task. That's how. So why are the RPGers in the shop not being given the same level of tooling?

We wish we could say these incidents were isolated but that isn't the case. We seem to come across a similar story every other week. 

We can't help but wonder--does this also happen in the mainframe world? What about the UNIX arena? Is this type of thinking (or rather non-thinking) as prevalent in those camps? We'd like to hear your views on the subject.

Before we go, and lest we be accused of "management bashing" we should also point out that we have encountered many situations where it's the RPG (and COBOL) developers in the shop who are the block to progress. One manager wrote to us a couple of years ago asking for any ideas we might have on how to encourage his developers to accept the educational opportunities he was offering them. He recognized that updating their skills was critical to keeping the i a relevant and vibrant part of the organization's future IT plans. He had given his team (and there were a dozen or so in the shop) the opportunity to attend one of our Summit conferences or to go to COMMON. All of them had said "No."

Jon's approach (he being the one who plays the "bad cop" role in the partnership) was simply to suggest that he fire them on the basis that there are plenty of folks out there who would kill for a job that offered ongoing education. In Jon's defense, when Susan pointed out that this was perhaps a bit dramatic, he did revise his suggestion to saying that perhaps they should just fire one and see if the others got the message!

Why are so many managers and programmers so short-sighted? Is it really that much easier to stand still than to move?

Just a Job?

We love what we do--both programming and teaching. Being "techies" defines in part who we are as well as what we do. So determined have we been to maintain that path that during our time with IBM we individually resisted many attempts to "promote" us to management positions. It might have meant more money, but it wasn't our passion. Of course, if you force him to, Jon will admit that he has in fact held two senior IT management positions during his career, but he claims he didn't inhale and is now completely cured.

"Our passion"? Yes, there is no way we would work the crazy hours and travel as much as we do if it were "just a job". The writing aspect of our teaching role in particular certainly does not pay many bills--we learned very early on never to keep track of our hours when writing something--the hourly rate is just too depressing.

This "passion" has driven us to constantly learn and explore new ways of doing things. Not that we have always adopted them--upon exploration many just didn't fit our mindset or needs. But we have always enjoyed exploring the new avenues that open in our world. In the i world in particular this has recently included things like PHP and MySQL, application frameworks, and other technologies such as Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) (which Jon spent the weekend wrestling with). He's in the love-hate stage of the relationship right now but admits that the Web site he's working on is looking better by the day. We also learn by teaching. Our students stretch our knowledge in ways that we would never have dreamed of--challenging us to learn more each day. 

When we talked to some friends of ours (*) on this subject, one word that cropped up frequently was "hooked". At some point in our early computing career we all got hooked. Hooked on the challenge of creating things, of making inanimate objects jump to our commands--most of the time anyway. Perhaps too a desire to make things better--not earth moving, life-saving better, but incrementally better--whether that be an easier way to process payments on the system, delivering invoices via email or. ...  Striving for constant improvement brings us back to the notion of lifelong learning.

Since our careers have involved a constant state of learning, we always have a certain amount of difficulty in understanding people for whom programming is just a job. They have no passion for what they do and no desire to learn anything new. Indeed it seems to us that just a job is a very close relative to "good enough"--and, as those of you who have followed us for years will know, that's a mantra to which we will never subscribe.

So, are computers your passion? Or at least one of your passions? We'd be interested to hear from you.


*A shout out to some good friends who are among the most passionate people we know for inspiring this week's missive. Aaron Bartell, Mike Pavlak, Trevor Perry and Scott Klement--thanks for the inspiration guys. Whenever we find our enthusiasm levels sagging we know we can always find inspiration in your work.

Our Annual Pilgrimage

We're writing while at the beginning of our annual pilgrimage to Rochester (actually we had to miss the trip last year but who's counting). The Web definition we found for pilgrimage is "a journey to a sacred place." Wikipedia describes it as a journey to "a shrine of importance to a person's beliefs and faith." That's pretty close to how we feel about Rochester--the birthplace of our favorite system.

We've always had a special place in our hearts for the town. Despite its less than hospitable climate, we find it a great place to be--a city that feels more like a town. It has grown and changed in the years since we moved away. Some of the changes for the better (better hotels and you can now eat after 9 p.m.) Some are for the worse (our favorite brew pub downtown is long gone). Others are for no reason that anyone can fathom (expanding Highway 52 to three lanes each way). 

Mostly, though, it is IBM Rochester that keeps drawing us back. The Rochester lab site illustrates the Minnesota tendency to take things literally--like "big blue." This is about the biggest and bluest building you'll ever see. Actually, it's a series of connected buildings with imaginative names like "Building 006"
and "Building 025" with no rhyme or reason (that we've been able to figure out) as to the numeric sequence. However, when you consider that IBM also took that wonderful and evocative name "Silverlake" and turned it into "AS/400" (Application Server 400 if we want to be verbose), all of a sudden the building numbers seem to make a perverse kind of sense.

As big and blue as the buildings are, it's the people at IBM in Rochester that make the trip truly worthwhile. There are great IBMers everywhere, but in Rochester there is always a feeling of being among kindred spirits like nowhere else we've been. Things are changing a little now that it's all supposed to be about "Power Systems" but we suspect that many of the longtime IBMers in Rochester feel like we do--it's really all about i.

Why are we here and what brings us back each year? If it were truly a religious pilgrimage, we suppose we should be coming back each year just because it's here. In truth, we're here for the annual Summer School for the Academic Initiative program. Professors from colleges, universities, community colleges, etc. come together to get caught up on what's happening with the platform (this year, including AIX along with IBM i) so they can plan for updates and additions to their curricula.

We've been involved with this program for many, many years--more than two system names ago! It was called Partners in Education long ago--a name we still find more descriptive than the current one. But then IBM has this thing with names as we noted earlier. This is a great group of people--the attendees and the IBMers who work with the schools and our fellow Summer School instructors. We always enjoy working with them.

We've already managed to spend some quality time with longtime friends, and the week has just begun. We have so much to look forward to--walking around Silverlake, visiting Andy's (the local wine store), eating at John Hardy's BBQ, watching the human foosball tournament at lunch time. ... And most importantly of all, communing with many fellow fans of the greatest system a business can buy.

Japanese Imports and a New Role for COMMON?

We've written a lot about the future of the IBM i community in recent posts--and this one is no exception. We hadn't planned to return to the subject this week, but a recent blog post by Chris Maxcer that we picked up on LinkedIn made us think again. It highlighted a new program from a consortium of Japanese Business Partners and ISVs known simply as the "IBM i Manifest Initiative". Several of you commented about ways to get the word out about the value of IBM i and this group in Japan seems to have actually done something about that.

The purpose of this collective effort is to revitalize the IBM i market place in Japan and inform the IT community at large of the value proposition of our favorite system. These are objectives that we can all applaud. And they aren't just talking--they are doing things, including placing a full page (and very expensive) advertisement in the Nikkei--Japan's equivalent of the Wall Street Journal. S. Kakizawa, a member of the iManifest Advisory Board, has adapted a well-known JFK quote to sum up the group's message,"Ask not what IBM can do for you, ask instead what you can do for your IBM i community."

We won't go into more detail on the group's work here, instead we suggest you do as we did and read Martin Fincham's blog "My Midrange Meddle". In his blog, Martin calls on his fellow European ISVs to mount a similar initiative--hopefully some of the larger ISVs in North America will also step up to the plate. You can read the English translation of the Japanese iManifest Declaration here.

In a previous blog entry titled "What Does the i Community Need?" we mentioned that Business Partners and ISVs have a huge stake in the future of the IBM i. While many have developed versions of their applications to run on other platforms, the vast majority still make the bulk of their revenue from the IBM i. Hopefully they will see the wisdom of investing a few of those dollars to help preserve their future revenue stream.

So who will take the initiative in North America? We are unaware of any North American ISV/BP trade organization. In the past these vendors were represented to the body of IBM through the Business Partner program. But due to changes in emphasis in the BP support group, this is no longer as effective a vehicle as it was in the past. But a new trade organization could present a united front to IBM and give these vendors a central focus point for collaborative marketing efforts. And please don't trot out the old "they are competitors; they'll never co-operate" line because trade organizations are common and very successful in other industries. There is no real reason to suppose that they would not work in ours.

So where are we going with this? Well here's a radical thought--perhaps, just perhaps--this is a role in which COMMON could (and in our opinion should) play a leadership role. It has been a long time since COMMON was a user group in the old sense of the word. It has aspirations to be a professional body and often draws comparisons to such organizations. But it isn't a professional body, and isn't ever likely to be if for no other reason than because our profession isn't regulated in the same way as doctors, dentists, hygienists, architects, etc. Perhaps it should be, but it isn't. And if it were, it would surely be done on an industry basis and not be an IBM Power Systems specific organization as COMMON is.

What does COMMON bring to such an organization? An administrative staff with broad connections in the i community, convention and trade show planning expertise, and a strong connection with IBM. All of the things in fact that an ISV/BP trade organization would need. It would give COMMON a new raison d'etre, and give the fledgling new trade organization a foundation that could take months or years to build otherwise.

We're tempted to go into more detail of the thinking behind this suggestion, but we'd rather hear from some of you. One last thing we should mention. This is not a new idea. A good friend of ours, Alan Zwiren, first suggested this notion to us some years ago and it's an idea that has resonated with us ever since. Perhaps now is the time to bring it to fruition as we look at how this new Japanese import can work for all of us.