Happy Holidays!

It's the Christmas season and this is our last blog of the year, which means it's our last chance to extend seasons greetings to our readers. In particular thanks to those of you who have contributed to the blog via your comments. It's always nice to know that some of you find the posts interesting enough to join in the discussion.

In the spirit of the season a little reminiscing is in order. Some of you may have already seen this but we got a real chuckle out of it and thought we'd pass it along. It is a 1960s (i.e., Mad Men era) impression of Google. Give it a test drive here. It's a lot of fun. When we fed in our own names some of the images of Susan were recognizable but Jon's--well, not so much. Jon's Google hits are always a bit odd anyway because a young rock and blues artist has the same name. For those of you too young to remember, it's a pretty darn good impression of what a '60s version of Google might have been like. Assuming there had been an Internet for Google to search, of course.

Our Naughty and Nice List Winners for 2012

Santa will shortly be on his way and we thought we'd just let him know via this blog who are our personal naughty and nice champions this year.

Naughty: Software companies that treat their existing customers badly. There's a certain purveyor of accounting software (you know who they are Santa) whose software we use on our Macs to do our bookkeeping. Every year they come out with a new release. And every year we get the same email.

"As a loyal customer ... we are pleased to offer you this special upgrade rate of only $..."

Only one problem. The "special rate" is invariably at least 20 percent higher than the cost of a brand new copy of the same software at any number of local computer retailers--and that is their normal price not a special sale offering. So for being a "loyal customer" we get to pay 20 percent more. Thanks but no thanks.

Nice: IBM Rational Software for removing the charges from Open Access. We were very critical of Rational's handling of Open Access so it only seems fair to offer kudos to them for making the right decision, reversing their position, removing the charges and incorporating it into the compiler.

Now that it has been liberated we are beginning to see more articles on the topic and people sharing their own ideas for handlers. Hopefully we'll see some collaborative open-source projects in the future and then, as Wallace (of Wallace and Gromit), the voice of our GPS, would say, "Let's see what this baby can do!"

We hope you all have a wonderful festive season--no matter how or where you celebrate it.

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.

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.

A (Small) Step in the Right Direction

Although it doesn't appear to have been announced yet in the RPG Cafe, our friend Trevor Perry passed along to us a small gem that he found today buried in IBM's announcement letters. Not sure why he was trolling thorough them, but thanks anyway, Trevor.

What exactly is this news? Well, apparently the folks at Rational have finally got around to making Open Access available in demo mode. You can find the details here. We've created a tiny URL for it to make it possible to memorize the link. Here it is: tinyurl.com/RPGOpenAccessEvaluation. The announcement apparently came out on July 26. Why we haven't heard anything about it is anybody's guess.

The document includes a full description of the download and install process. Unfortunately we can't test it out as we don't have a customer number, and even if we did, the system we use already has the fully licensed product installed so it still wouldn't be a valid test. Perhaps if any of you try the process described you would be kind enough to share your experiences with us via the comments section.

According to the announcement, the product can now be used without a key for the normal 70-day trial period. It's still not the "right" answer, which is to simply make the capability part of the operating system as it should have been from the very beginning. But it does at least mean that some proof-of-concept work can be done before laying out cash. Perhaps more importantly, if the process works as advertised, it will help avoid the truly nightmarish task faced by those brave soles who have tried to order it in the past. It is interesting that we heard about this on the very day that we saw Dan Burger's nicely stated editorial on the topic which he aptly named "RPG Open Access Suffering from Inaccessibility"--wish we'd thought of that headline Dan. You can read Dan's piece here.

So, to the folks at Rational , thanks for at least going part of the way. We can now suggest to our clients that they give the product a trial run. Perhaps now that everyone can at least test drive it, Jon will consider writing a few more articles on the topic. He has been avoiding doing that of late because it just seemed so futile to produce examples that so few people could actually use. We still hope, however, that you will eventually see the light and stop this silliness of charging for the product. If you want to make money from OA, build and sell add-ons to make it easier for developers to build programs around it. OA should be an operating system capability--period.

Yes, We Can

Sometimes all people need is a a bit of confidence and a point in the right direction to make good things happen.

Case in point: last week (on Friday the 13th, as it turns out) we did a full day of education for the IBM i users group in Dallas--MMSA. The agenda didn’t contain any topics specifically dedicated to doing Web interfaces from RPG, although two of our examples of using RPG Special Files and Open Access did involve utilizing CGIDEV2 to write report output directly to a browser instead of to a spool file.

Apparently that was enough to spur one enterprising RPGer in the audience to go back and write his first “Web from RPG” program that very evening. He was amazed, not just that RPG was capable of doing Web applications, but perhaps more importantly that he could do it himself. Sounds like Friday the 13th was a lucky day for him!

You may occasionally read about some of the really cool things RPGers are doing with our favorite business language. We suspect we don’t hear nearly enough of those stories--perhaps because those doing the work are convinced it wasn’t rocket science to do, so surely everyone else is already out there doing it. In reality, we see too many RPG shops giving up the reins on applications that don’t fit their traditional green-screen RPG mental model. The modern application requirements are going to “the Web guys,” sometimes against the wishes of the RPGers, other times even at the suggestion of the RPGers and perhaps most frightening of all, sometimes with the RPGers being completely oblivious to the fact that it’s even happening.

This isn’t meant to start a debate on whether green screens are bad or about the merits and limitations of browser or mobile application interfaces. The fact of life is in every company we know of, there’s at least some level of requirement for or interest in of non-green-screen access to the company’s data and application resources. This may not be a browser-based interface to an existing application; it may be some whole new application idea. If the RPGers in the shop aren’t part of those discussions, they risk losing touch with the leading-edge requirements in the shop. Then they begin to lose applications. They may go off the IBM i, perhaps relegating the i to being purely a database server, at best, or removing i from the picture altogether, leaving the new applications and the old ones either completely separate, forcing unnatural acts of endless replication and synchronization issues to “integrate” them.

Bottom line: keep your eyes and ears open for opportunities to say, “Yes, we can do that” when you hear about non-traditional applications. Insert yourself into a leadership position on those kinds of user projects. Maybe you won’t write the application yourself in RPG. There are many other options - from finding and implementing an existing application (open source or not) to using a tool to help you generate a non-traditional application without writing much code yourself. You may even work together with “the Web guys” to build an application that blends their expertise and yours. After all, most RPGers are lousy at web page design.

Catch yourself when you’re tempted to express doubt that you can implement something just because it’s something you haven’t done before. You just may surprise yourself at how easily you can do it.

Being in the game is always better than sitting on the sidelines. Say “yes” now and figure out how later! 

Assorted Rational-Related Ramblings

Before we get to this week's topic, an update on the problem with the RPG Open Access Web page that we identified in last week's blog. As of the time of writing the problem has been "fixed" and we were really looking forward to telling you that. But note that we placed the word "fixed" in quotation marks. Why? Because it isn't really fixed. Sure the big green button has been removed, but there's still no pricing and ordering information on the page.

The only real option available is to click on the "Request a Quote" link in the "We're here to help" section of the Web page. At this point a form with more than a dozen compulsory questions pops up. There are then an additional bunch of completely irrelevant questions. Originally we weren't going to comment on those, but changed our mind after we tried to complete the "Platforms you utilize" section of the form. There is no option for IBM i--or any of the other names the system has been known by. To add insult to injury, there IS an entry for OS/2 for heavens sake!

Please, please, please, IBM--do the "secret shopper" thing and try out your own websites before you inflict them on those of us who actually want to buy your products!

Other news from "i" Land

Last week Jon was lucky enough to attend the December TUG meeting, which was held at the IBM Lab. We always enjoy TUG but are rarely able to attend the meetings. This one featured an update on the latest Rational offerings, including Barbara Morris talking about Open Access. The sessions were good, but by far the most interesting part of the afternoon was the closing Roundtable hosted by George Voutsinas (IBM IBM Rational Power Development Manager) and Mike Fulton (IBM Rational Power Architect). It was nice to see how much attention was being paid by these IBMers to the issues raised by the members. Even more interesting was their desire to find an effective way to reach out to the community so that they could not only educate them on what was available, but also find out what they need to keep their systems alive and vital. The IBM Toronto crew has always been good at listening to what their customers want, but, as we've said many times before, IBM lost an incredible marketing force when they did away with the field SEs. Indeed one user noted that their SE always got them to try "new stuff" and that without that input, finding the time to try new things within a small shop like theirs was a major challenge.

The lab folks really do want to find better ways to "get the word out" and are looking for any suggestions. Among other topics touched on during the discussions were virtual conferences and exploiting social media sites like Facebook and Twitter. No one seems quite sure how all this might work, so if you have any inspirations let us know and we'll be sure to pass them on. But please let's not get on the "IBM should do more advertising" kick. It just isn't going to happen and it's highly unlikely that it would be effective anyway. It's really tough to outspend the Microsofts of this world.

One other thing that came up during the meeting that we found interesting was that apparently the Rational Team Concert Community Edition now supports builds for the IBM i. This is apparently a result of eliminating pricing of the server components. We had briefly looked at this version of the product before because it was free for up to 10 users and so seemed a good option for some smaller shops. The problem in the past was that you still had to purchase the IBM i server component. Now that that cost has been eliminated we will be revisiting the product. We'll let you know what we find.

Time for Some Rational Decisions on Open Access

It is now some 12 months since Open Access (OA) was announced by IBM and some nine months since it first emerged “in the wild.” The original hype has died down and folks are beginning to get a far more realistic feel for where it fits in the overall picture of application modernization for IBM i. It is not a silver bullet, but as we have so often said before--neither is anything else and almost certainly never will be.

So why do we say that decisions are needed by Rational? Seven reasons:

1) The vast majority of IBM i users have still not heard about it. This is not for a lack of effort on the part of a number of people, notably the ISVs who market products based on OA. However, the majority of the efforts to publicize Open Access to date seem to come from IBM Rochester rather than the folks who get the revenue--Rational. 

2) It is still way too difficult to place an order for the product. Rational’s own sales force often  doesn’t seem to understand IBM i in general and Open Access in particular. We have heard many stories of people being told by sales staff that they’ve never heard of it, and even that it doesn't exist, even when the product code is supplied.  Then there was Aaron Bartell's tale of his attempts to purchase the product which he described on his blog.

Now admittedly, Aaron did not know the correct process and tried to order the product before it was available. So we thought we’d give it a try today.  We found our way to the Open Access product page and found a prominent green button on the right-hand-side marked “View US prices & buy.” Looks good, right? Sadly when we pressed it we got “Following error occurred while processing your request. Error: 102 No products found matching your search criteria. Please try a different search.” Note this is from the product page!

Even those in IBM who are spreading the good word have their efforts undermined when a customer hits a brick wall once they decide to go ahead and try to buy the product. Someone at Rational needs to follow the principles behind the TV show “Undercover Boss” and try to buy their own products.

3) There's no free trial. You can try RDP (an $800+ product) free for 60 days. But you can't try the $500 OA. Yes, you can order it and try it for 70 days and return it if you don't want it. But that presumes you can persuade your manager that he really wants all of the pain of trying to order it just to experiment for 70 days.

4) The majority of sales will probably be at the $500 (P05) or $1,000 (P10) price levels. From that revenue IBM has to cover the cost of handling the order, paying commission, shipping CDs, etc. Can there really be enough profit left after those expenses are factored in to make it worth while? When you add in the “cost” of frustrating your most loyal customer base it just does not appear to make economic sense. And if anyone at Rational is reading this, please don't think we are suggesting that the prices are too low (more on this later).

5) The cost and difficulty of ordering OA are barriers to innovation. We have reached a point in time when open source is beginning to take off in the community, and indeed several ISVs are also experimenting with supplying their software free-of-charge. But nobody is likely to explore building open source OA handlers when they cannot be used without buying OA from IBM.

6) Every barrier to modernization increases the likelihood that companies will move off the platform. Rational has made good money over the years selling compiler and tool licenses to IBM i users. It doesn't seem to make sense to continue to take actions that may reduce that potential revenue stream.

7) Why charge for Open Access? We’ve heard various reasons, ranging from needing the revenue (see point 4) to tracking the number of users etc. Users can be tracked without making them pay for a product. Ask Zend. For convenience of installation Zend Server is shipped on every new box. All you have to do is install it and then enter your serial number on Zend’s website to get the full activation key. Voila--usage tracked.

So what's to do? In our opinion the longer-term solution is simply to bundle OA with the operating system, where frankly we believe it should have been to begin with. If Rational needs to make some revenue from the product then the organization should simply increase the compiler price a little. That way those who want to stay with their green screens are helping to subsidize those that want to move forward.

In the short term Rational should follow Zend's lead. Make the product available for instant free download and activate it via the Web if activation tracking is needed.

The solution seems very simple and once it is in place, the door is open and we can all get on with exploiting this great little tool.

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