Rational Gives an Early Valentine With Free Open Access

They love us. They really love us! Finally IBM Rational has admitted the folly of trying to persuade us to buy our own gifts and is giving us Open Access for free.

Today's announcement confirms the rumors that have been circulating for the last few months. Namely that the OA run-time components are being bundled with IBM i and the compiler components are being included with the compiler. Of course it will all have to be distributed as PTFs for a while, but over time will be shipped as standard. We just read Steve Wills' You and i blog and noticed that our "Valentine" headline is even more appropriate than we thought because the PTFs are due to be available starting on Feb. 14!

The link we have for the formal announcement letter doesn't seem to be working right now so we'll post that in the comments as soon as we can confirm it.

We think this is a good thing for several reasons:

1. ISVs that have products that utilize OA no longer have to get customers to install an additional chargeable feature before they can even take advantage of a free trial. IBM partly addressed this by making a trial version of OA available a few months ago but it was still an impediment.
2. Smaller ISVs that might otherwise have developed handlers couldn't justify doing so since, in some instances, the cost to the client of installing OA would have exceeded what they could reasonably charge for the product. 
3. Open-source advocates were never going to embrace writing handlers that relied on a chargeable product.
4. Similarly the number of magazine articles on the subject of OA has been severely lacking. Although we have written a couple ourselves we're only aware of two or three other writers who have done anything. In fact we had given up writing on the subject, other than here in the blog. The reason is the same--there's little satisfaction in writing an article on a subject that you know most of your readers can't put into practice. Now that everyone will be able to use the examples we present we'll be dusting off a couple of ideas that we have on hold. In the meantime you can find our earlier articles on OA here and here.
5. Last, but not least, it will hopefully dispel the notion that the only thing OA is good for is modernizing 5250 applications. As we've said before, while this is a very important function of OA it's only a tiny part of what can be done with it. We need more applications that exploit email, processing IFS files, Web services, etc. OA is an excellent way to enable such features for "the masses." Even highly skilled RPG programmers can make use of OA. For example, during a recent discussion with IBM's Barbara Morris, we discovered that even though she is comfortable with using the IFS APIs, she actually finds it easier to use an IFS handler that she wrote herself whenever she needs to process IFS files in RPG.

Rational has shown us a little love here. Let's return the favor and thank them the best way we can--by using OA to add new functionality to our favorite language.

Please use the Comments section of this blog to pass on your ideas of the kind of handlers you'd like to see written or indeed to tell us about those that you plan to write.

Fairy Tales for Adults

There are so many titles we could use to describe this week's blog but we'll settle for "Fairly Tales for Adults" (or "Stories of the joys of modern travel").

Open Access

Before we begin the tale, a quick follow-up on last week's blog. Marc O. Vadeboncoeur posted an excellent response to our request for people to let us know how they got on with the trial download of RPG Open Access that we mentioned. Marc's step-by-step instructions give you all you need to know to get the thing up and running. Thanks, Marc.

Unintended Consequences

We talked a few weeks ago about "Unintended Consequences." Well this past weekend we encountered yet another example. Remember last winter when there were any number of occasions when people were stranded in planes stuck out on the runway either waiting for a gate or permission from Air Traffic Control (ATC) to take off? Well one of the effects was that pressure was bought to bear on the airlines to limit the length of time that passengers could be held captive in this manner. We believe that there were even some fines levied by the FAA against some of the worst offenders. Well - to cut a long story short - we just got caught in the backwash of that action. 

Because Chicago O'Hare was suffering from bad weather conditions, we were stuck at the end of the runway for a prolonged period of time. Several false starts before the pilot proudly announced that we had finally received a solid "wheels up" time and would be taking off in 10 minutes. The brief period of celebration was cut short however when 5 minutes later he was forced to announce that despite arguing with ground control to allow us to continue, he had been ordered back to the gate as we had now exceeded our 2.5 hours of "on the plane" time. Back to the gate we went - everybody got off and then, after about 30 minutes, we all got back on again. All went well until O'Hare put us on another 50 minute ground hold! We did eventually make it to Chicago - but of course missed our connection. Next was 30 minutes trying to get rebooked for flights the next day, and over an hour trying to figure out where our checked luggage was and whether we could just get it, so we could rent a car and drive overnight to where we needed to be. Answer: No. 

Net result? $250 on a hotel room for the "night" (5 hours hardly counts as a night) - an 8:30am flight to the "wrong" city (no flights available for 24 hours to where we actually wanted to go) followed by a drive to another city where (you guessed it) our luggage had been sent - followed by a 60 minute drive to the customer location. Ah the joys of travel. And all because some idiot thought that we'd rather stretch our legs than take off. 

Our good buddy Charlie, the (only) American Eagle flight attendant stuck with us on this flight American 4003 on Sunday August 7th if you are reading this at AA, deserves a promotion for the way he handled the whole scenario. He turned a crowd of angry, frustrated business travellers into a cheering, joking, supportive mob with his sense of humor and common-sense approach to the whole situation. The cockpit crew were also great at making the best of a bad situation. The pilot announced just before landing - 6 hours after were were originally scheduled to arrive in Chicago - "We'll be touching down shortly in Milwaukee since Chicago is fogged in  . . .  Just kidding! We're at O'Hare!" 

Sadly our "good fortune" ended with our flight crew. The hotel (an expensive and well-known chain whose name starts with "E" and ends with a word that sounds like the the English word for candy) was unable to supply hot water the next morning. A lack of heat that extended to the breakfast - but that's another story. Everyone has mechanical problems from time to time - we expect it when traveling. What we don't expect is that nobody on the staff seemed to give a ... Needless to say, we won't be making a return visit any time soon. Jon gave up washing in cold water when he ended his scouting career some 45-odd years ago - not the sort of thing one wants to reminisce about. 

The one-way car rental to get us from the city where we finally landed to the city where we could retrieve our luggage and then get to where we wanted to be was another $175 for about 8 hours. Then we had to go back to the local airport to trade it in for a similar car to secure a "local" rental rate. It was either that or pay more than $100 extra per day for the rest of the week. 

Even with our lack of sleep and shower and hundreds of dollars in out-of-pocket expense, we weren't the only ones inconvenienced. We had been scheduled to begin teaching a class at 8:30 Monday morning. We arrived at the client's location at 2:30 PM - decidedly crumpled and wearing jeans and sneakers since our business clothes were crumpled in the luggage we picked up on the way to their location. Thankfully, our students were sympathetic to our situation and we're working out how to make up the missed teaching time. 

All in all, we've had better weeks! The remainder of the trip has already been significantly better than the inauspicious beginning, thankfully! 

Those of you who don't travel frequently for business - don't envy those who do. Sometimes things go relatively smoothly and seeing new places can be interesting. Sometimes, things go wrong and you wonder why you ever decided this was a good way to make a living! 

OA and PHP News

We were both delighted and saddened to see Profound Logic announced at COMMON that they will be reselling IBM Rational's Open Access: RPG Edition (OA) along with their own Profound UI tooling. Delighted because it will make it easier for the folks buying Profound UI to get their hands on the OA product. Saddened, though, by realizing this means it's apparently easier for an ISV to go through the process of signing up to be a reseller (no easy task) than it was for them to try to explain to their perspective customers how to buy it!

You could sense Profound CEO Alex Roytman's frustration in the announcement. For sure he's not doing it for the money, how much can you make on a product that typically sells for less than $2,000. This notion was cemented in our minds by his comment that he still believes the product should simply be delivered free as part of the OS.

We had really hoped by now IBM would have relented and abandoned this pricing silliness, or at least come up with a free trial version, or failing that at least made it simpler to order ... but no. Here we are more than a year after OA's introduction and apparently nothing has changed. Our friend Aaron Bartell can bear witness to that having recently risked his sanity and once again braved the waters in an attempt to order it.

Dear IBM: We love you dearly, but do you have to make it this hard?

On an altogether happier note ...

We appear to be approaching the formal launch of the new IBM i toolkit. By all accounts it will not only improve the capabilities and performance of our PHP applications, but will also herald a revolutionary departure from the IBM norm in two other ways. First, the new toolkit is open source, and second it is RPG-based. Seriously ... for real! The toolkit is being jointly developed by IBM, Zend, and members of the RPG community. Like the EasyCom toolkit that Zend currently delivers, and which it will ultimately replace, this new offering allows for program and procedure calls, access to system resources such as spool files, data queues, etc.

As if the news that the new tools would be coded in RPG wasn't enough, we also understand the performance is significantly improved (it certainly appeared so in the short test drive we had) and the subprocedure call mechanism now allows for return values--real ones--not just the four byte integers currently supported. No longer will you need to rewrite or wrapper subprocedures for reuse on the Web. That's certainly good news as it's been a source of frustration for us and many others who used the PHP or Java toolkits.

Since the community will be able to contribute to this new offering, it will be interesting to see how it evolves. Another point we should note is that it isn't just intended for use by PHP. The underlying mechanisms will be usable from any platform, or indeed between IBM i systems. We're really looking forward to having a chance to play with this new toy and will report back on our findings.