RSE Wish List--Now With Clout!

Almost a year ago, we wrote about our own RSE feature wish list and many of you responded via the blog.

We recently attended a meeting of TUG, our own local user group, which was held at the IBM Rational Toronto lab. Not surprisingly, the topic was RDP. Actually, in a way it was a bit surprising that the focus was on "just" RDP rather than the more expensive packages/add-ons such as RTC. Kudos to the lab folks for resisting the urge to up-sell!

Out of all of the information covered in that session, the one item that piqued our interest most was the mention of a Web page where ordinary developers can enter and vote on requests for enhancements (RFEs). So we couldn't resist taking a look at the RFEs currently out there for RDP to see how our favorites were faring in the voting and what other requests had been made.

We'll hit a few highlights here, but we strongly encourage those of you who use RSE to visit the site and cast votes for your own favorites and/or even put your personal favorite new/changed feature request in for consideration. You'll need to create an IBM ID to do this if you don't have one already, but it doesn't require a customer number or serial number or anything like that, so you can set one up very easily.

We looked at the list of the top 20 vote getters for RDP. We're a tad disappointed at how few of our personal favorites were in the list. What we haven't yet done is figure out whether the rest of our favorites have even been requested. If not, we'll be entering some new requests of our own very soon!

Looking at the top 20 by votes, we're gratified to see that one of our favorites--the ability to indent/reformat existing /Free RPG code--is second in the list as of this writing, with 29 votes. We'd especially encourage everyone to vote for this one, even though it's near the top of the list already, don't assume it will stay there. This is one of the most requested features we hear from RSE users and lots of votes could help propel it to a status where IBM will more seriously consider adding it!

On the other hand, we're a bit concerned about the request at the very top of the list--constantly update the Outline View with changes made in the editor. We understand the value of such an enhancement. However, as a few people have pointed out in the comments on this one, there are concerns of the performance impact of such an enhancement. Even if the outline view were to only be updated from local editor changes, which is how the request is currently stated, it could still impact the performance of editing, perhaps dramatically especially for very large source members, given the way the Outline is currently populated. At the very least, if IBM decides to do this one we hope IBM follows the advice as stated in the comments, making it a feature than can be turned on and off, preferably in a very easy way (hint: not searching through hundreds of preferences pages to find the right one!).

We believe this Outline View request is a case of "be careful what you ask for" and encourage any of our readers who may decide to cast a vote for this feature to also add their voices in the comments section that this should be optional and also should only be done if it can be accomplished without noticeable editing performance degradation in medium to large source members.

We are delighted to see that another of our top wish list items is also in the top 10, although we would love to see it even higher than its current No. 7 (as of this writing.) That's the request for RDP to run natively on Mac. Yes! We love our Macs and we love our RDP. If we could run RDP as a native Mac application (without using the Windows virtual machine we currently use), we would be to very happy-- no, ecstatic--campers! We fear this may become a sort of chicken and egg situation. IBM i folks don't use Macs because tools such as RDP don't work natively on Macs. Consequently, they don't request Mac support because it doesn't impact them immediately. Please consider voting for this one, even if you don't use a Mac today. Wouldn't you like the opportunity consider using a more stable and reliable workstation platform--much like the more stable and reliable server platform we all know and love?

A request for SQL prompting is in the top 20--one of the requests that we forgot to put into our original wish list, but were grateful to our readers for pointing out the omission. We're a little surprised it's as far down the list as it is at the moment. If you use embedded SQL and RSE and think this would be helpful, by all means, cast your vote!

The list contains many more very useful features so we could go on and on commenting on other items among (and not among) the top 20 vote getters. But we'll save more comments for another day, another post.

Now, don't just sit there--go out and vote!

Educating ... Jon (Among Others)

Educating ... Jon (among others)

This week we want to cover two topics related to education. The first relates to education in the formal sense, the second to that gained in the school of hard-knocks.

Back in our Oct. 25 blog post ("IT Must Be Magic") we continued a discussion on the shortage of young people entering the IT field. Those of you interested in the topic should check out part of an InfoWorld article titled, "11 programming trends to watch." The whole article is well worth reading, but the section headed "Programming trend No. 8: Traditional education fades from relevance" really grabbed our attention. Until we read this we had thought that hijacking talented high schoolers en route to university was something that only happened in the sporting world. Apparently not. It seems that some high-tech firms are actively pursuing the same approach. Interesting.

The article also references a Fast Company piece titled, "Silicon Valley's New Hiring Strategy." Has this approach been triggered by the shortage of IT grads or has experience simply shown that a degree in IT doesn't really prove that you can program in today's fast moving world?

This weekend Jon was doing some work with embedded SQL and had an "interesting" time debugging problems with one particular program. It hasn't done anything to improve his love/hate relationship with SQL, but he can explain why himself:

Susan has always been our in-house SQL person, but I've been doing more and more of it lately, particularly in PHP. I've also been using more and more of it in my RPG code. I want to like SQL--I really do. I have long been convinced that it's the right way to go--not for everything, but certainly for set retrieval and processing. I still have a gag reflex when faced by some of its more arcane syntax, but I am fighting that. Then just when SQL was starting to win me over ...

The embedded SQL query I was building was a simple one. Just a straight SELECT with a simple WHERE clause. In the past I've often done such trivial retrievals with a SELECT * into a DS defined by referencing the external file definition. But while I was building this particular one I found myself hearing the voice of IBM's Mike Cain telling me not to waste time retrieving data I didn't need. OK, I thought, I'll be a good boy and SELECT just the columns I need and specify them in the DS--how hard can it be?

Problem was I didn't get the DS right. I was tired and simply reversed a couple of fields. As a result the values I was seeing made no sense. Now I could swear that when I've done something foolish like that in the past the SQL pre-compiler berated me and told me that the structure was not usable. Not this time. Not a word--even though one of the fields was alpha and the other numeric. It seems to me that changes made in SQL in general, and the pre-compiler in particular, in recent years have allowed it to do a lot of implicit casting between different data types. I can only conclude that in that light IBM has relaxed the validation rules. Either that or my brain has gone completely to mush and I am mismembering the "olden days."

I was clearly having a bad day as I also accidentaly discovered that the pre-compiler doesn't issue an error if you specify a column name in a SELECT clause that doesn't even exist in the table in question. The result is an SQL 42703 error at runtime. At least the error message was explicit about the cause of the problem. Maybe I've never made that mistake before, but it really surprised me that the pre-compiler didn't catch it, particularly since earlier it had failed a compile because the table in question was not found in the library list.

What's the point of all this? Other than to demonstrate my own apparent incompetence? Basically I want to warn others not to make too many assumptions about what potential problems the pre-compiler will or will not diagnose. Sometimes our dear old RPG compiler spoils us and lulls us into a false sense of security!

Thanks for the Comments!

We're supposed to be on vacation so instead of coming up with a new topic for this week, we thought we'd highlight a few of the recent comments on posts and continue some of those discussions.

Our "Jon and Susan Get Educated" post sparked a number of comments. One in particular made us realize that we had erred in our tests. While reading J Taylor's comment on his own SQL vs. Native tests we realized that we had in fact given the Native options an unintentional edge. We had not included the open/close of the file within the timing loop. Those tasks had been left to the RPG cycle logic so the comparison was very slightly slanted against SQL. "J" did not mention how many iterations of the loop he performed, but from his results we wonder if it may have only been only a single iteration. If that is the case, then SQL would never have stood a chance -- the initial overhead would have been too great to overcome.

Jeanne F offered an alternative possibility using the SQL COUNT feature. We did try that option, Jeanne, and the results were not pretty.

Darren commented that, in such circumstances, adding FETCH FIRST ROW ONLY would boost performance in cases where the lookup field was not unique. In our case, the lookup key was unique, but we tried it anyway and in this case it had a slight negative impact. In other tests we ran though, where the key was not unique, it did result in a significant performance boost. Darren also suggested a completely different approach to our "existence testing" example which would be a better solution in many circumstances. In our case, we were trying to retrofit an SQL solution into a situation originally designed for record level I/O so it was tough to rework the logic to fit. 

Susan especially appreciates all the advice and support in comments on "Susan's Adventures in Mac-Land." We particularly enjoyed the thought of Rick's contrast between the gestures used with iPad (and Mac) and gestures used with the PC! Rick -- an overdue response to your question re: Parallels. First, I never even considered Bootcamp because I don't want to re-start my system to switch between Mac and Windows applications. I do it too often. Even though RDP is the only Windows application I use on a daily basis, I do switch back and forth a lot. In choosing between Parallels and VMware, Parallels seems to allow the two worlds to coexist a bit more seamlessly, as Aaron alluded. 

After our last post on the "New Release Cycle," IBM's Gina Whitney kindly posted details of how the DB2 team is making its announcements.Rather than repeat that information here, we'll simply point you to Gina's comment.

Thanks for the interactions -- keep those virtual cards and letters coming it!

Jon and Susan Get Educated

Some of you may remember that a few weeks back we mentioned that we would be heading to Boston for the inaugural DB2 for i Directions conference, and that we were looking forward to being students for a change. Well, it was a great event and we learned a lot -- our brains hurt!

One of the non-DB2 things we learned was to have more sympathy for our own students -- sitting in class and learning, learning, learning for days on end is tough. If we were a little closer in time to our school days (we wish!), perhaps it would have been a little easier. It made us even more determined to improve our own teaching skills to ensure that our students don't become overwhelmed. We'll be even more on the lookout for that "glazed over" look on our students' faces! We also learned that "Naked Fish" is a great restaurant that could use a few lessons in customer service, and that the Boston area has some really great brew pubs. 

On the DB2/SQL front, we learned far too much to be able to share it all with you here, but we will be covering a couple of items in the next edition of EXTRA so make sure that you're signed up to receive that when it comes out later this month. But just to give you a flavor of some of the things that came out during the course of the event ...

Handling Dates in SQL
For years we've watched as Internet discussions covered the topic of handling date fields in SQL -- for example when the DB2 table contains a "real" date field but the field in your program is an 8-digit numeric in YYMD form. This often leads to examples that include code such as this:

Select Date(Digits(MyNumDate) concat '000000') From MyTable ...

And that's a simple example. When the fake date is in character form things can get really ugly really quickly. The technique that we were introduced to during Directions came courtesy of a session on Web Query and is based on populating a table that has a row for each individual date in the range that you want to cover and a column for each replacement or comparison form you want of that date. For example for the date of February 1st, 2011, you might have a column containing 02/01/01, one containing 2001/02/01, one containing "Tuesday February the 1st, 2001", one containing 32 (the Julian day number), and ... well, you get the picture. It was kind of a "why didn't I think of that" moment. Rather than come up with a nasty convoluted SQL statement, a simple lookup can be incorporated in the statement which compares directly against the required date format. If you can't wait for EXTRA to come out to see how this all works, you can find the details in an appendix of the Web Query Redbooks publication. Does this approach perform well? According to the Redbooks, it outperforms direct usage of the SQL functions that would otherwise be required. We'll let you know what we find as we explore this further. 

CHAIN vs SELECT
During performance discussions with IBM's Mike Cain on the use of SQL for single row (as opposed to set-at-a-time) retrieval, Mike pointed out something that we hadn't thought about. Namely that if the SQL references only those columns that form part of the key, then the system is smart enough to know that it does not need to access the table itself, but rather can determine the found/not found status simply by referencing the index. Although we haven't had time to test this yet, Mike is convinced that it would perform as fast or faster than a CHAIN or SETLL used simply to determine if a given part number, customer number, or whatever, is valid. When we get a chance to test this out, we'll let you know the results.

We learned in Boston that it can be fun -- and tiring -- to be students. We came back with many good ideas on using SQL in our RPG programs. Not to worry -- we're still a long way from the "SQL is the answer -- now what's the question?" camp. Besides, we all know that RPG is the answer -- with or without SQL -- no matter the question, right? 

 

 

Sugar is Even Sweeter on IBM i!

What goes around comes around; a few weeks ago we blogged about IBM i shops being snubbed by Oracle (new owners of MySQL) who recently announced removal of support for their IBM i-specific version of MySQL. As we mentioned at that time, the effect of the Oracle announcement is more short-term annoyance than a real impact to most IBM i shops utilizing MySQL, which seems to be quite a number, based on the barrage of questions we’ve been getting since the Oracle announcement.

Now we have another announcement from the open-source universe. SugarCRM, an industry leading customer relationship-management  company, announced at their recent SugarCon event (how’s that for a conference name!) a new IBM i Solution Edition of SugarCRM. 

Now many of you out there may be thinking “So what? I’ve been running SugarCRM on IBM i for a while now.” Yes, there was certainly nothing preventing IBM i shops from implementing SugarCRM before this announcement. In some ways, the announcement probably primarily accomplishes two things.

First, it's a tangible acknowledgement of the strong place IBM i has in the industry.  The announcement  mentions some hallmarks of our platform that sound like bread and butter to those of us on i, but should catch the attention of the uninitiated; things like high availability, massive scalability and “lower total cost of ownership through reduced maintenance and ongoing support costs.”  

Second, for those IBM i shops who are still a bit jittery about using open-source software, the support from both IBM and SugarCRM may just provide that extra comfort factor needed to get them to implement solutions such as SugarCRM in their companies. The announcement mentions “highly coordinated, joint service teams” from IBM and SugarCRM.

Don’t forget, the fact that SugarCRM utilizes MySQL and there's a DB2 for i storage engine for MySQL-- owned, written and supported by IBM Rochester, not MySQL--can greatly simplify integration of SugarCRM data with existing IBM i native query tools and/or RPG applications. Read more about the impact of this storage engine here.

Take that, Oracle!
P.S.  One side note: We can’t resist--in the announcement, SugarCRM’s CTO and co-founder, Clint Oram refers twice to “System i.”  But he shouldn’t lose any sleep over it; it just helps to make him part of the family. We all--including IBM--regularly refer to our platform by one of its many past monikers. Welcome, Clint, to those of us who agree with Shakespeare that “A rose by any other name would smell as sweet.”

Check out this month's e-newsletter exclusive here.

Education, Relaxation and Remembrance

Being at home and dealing with the grit and grime of the household renovations was too much of a strain ... so this week we're on the road again, this time at the annual NEUGC conference in Framingham, Mass. This year the theme is "i Can Do Anything," a sentiment we wholeheartedly endorse.

We started our part of the conference with a half day hands-on RDP seminar. As is often the case when using hotel facilities, the labs didn't go completely smoothly. There never seems to be any end to the imaginative road blocks that the average hotel, in cahoots with their ISP, can throw in your path. It didn't cause us or our students too much grief, but did serve to remind us that no matter how many times you run labs, Mr. Murphy will always find some way to thwart your best efforts. Our thanks to the NEUGC technical team who certainly did all that they could to get things back on track. Luckily, we don't have any more labs among our sessions this week so at least those problems are behind us. However, Jon has a number of live demos in one of his presentations so Mr. Murphy may yet raise his head again!

SQL and DB2 Education

Those of you who have written to us in the past bemoaning the lack of advanced education focused specifically on SQL and DB2 will be pleased to hear that our System i Developer consortium is sponsoring the first DB2 Directions event which will be held right here in the Boston area from June the 20th to 23rd at the IBM Innovations Centre in Waltham, Mass. The formal announcement will be made in the next few days, but we thought we'd give you a heads up. We'll give you the Web links, etc., next week after the announcement is made. Our own IBM Systems Magazine is among the sponsors for this new event and we hope to meet some of you there, this time as fellow attendees; we'll be there to learn, not to teach.

R & R

When we leave Framingham we'll be headed for New Hampshire for a couple of days R & R with some friends before we head back home to the insanity of the "construction zone." They have a beautiful hot tub on the back deck, a stress reliever supreme that we could certainly use right now, but we'll just have to be patient.

RIP Marcus

We were saddened to hear last week of the death of our friend Marcus Dee. Marcus, for those who were not lucky enough to know him, was the CEO and inspirational leader of looksoftware. He was one of those rare people that immediately makes you feel that you really want to get them know them better; a more genuine "bloke" would be hard to find. Sadly, the distance between Australia and North America prevented us from getting to know him as well as we would have liked, but we always enjoyed his company on those occasions when we did have the chance to get together. Those of you who would like to know more about Marcus can check out the tribute site his friends and colleagues have set up.

The Not-Quite-So-Open-Source World

They say all good things must come to an end, but why? It appears that, at least for the time being, one good thing has come to an end, no thanks to the powers that be at Oracle.

The good thing? Support for MySQL on IBM i and easily accessible MySQL compiled code (binaries) for IBM i. The source code will remain available for i shops to compile and use; after all, that's the whole idea of open source.

Perhaps our title could be considered to be unfair. The source is still there, still open, even for IBM i shops to use. But with no (or "limited") official support from MySQL for IBM i, this signals the end of the openness and cooperation we were beginning to get accustomed to. IBM even created a MySQL storage engine for DB2 for i--a move that seemed pretty surprising, considering IBM’s reputation of being closed and proprietary, particularly when it came to the database. Welcoming PHP and MySQL to the IBM i family, even going the extra mile to provide easier integration between IBM i DB2 software-based applications and MySQL-based applications, certainly wasn't the old business as usual for IBM.

One may wonder what’s motivated Oracle, owners of MySQL, to make a move that would seem to discourage adoption of MySQL among the huge potential install-base of IBM i shops. The announcement from Oracle cites "very low demand" for the IBM i versions of MySQL. Strangely, they also link to an IBM Web page that documents end-of-support dates for various IBM i OS releases, despite the fact that on that page, both V5R4 and 6.1 (the only releases for which MySQL was supported) show no end-of-life support date. The Oracle announcement included additional OS releases for other platforms that are "obsolete or have end of life," so perhaps the link was intended to try to lump IBM i into the same category, despite the fact data on the linked page refutes that.

Also dropped from support in the same announcement was IBM AIX. Hmmmm... let's see... what do IBM AIX and IBM i have in common?  Could it be the letters “IBM?”  Both are run on Power Systems, which means there’s now no officially supported version of MySQL for Power Systems. Since Oracle also owns Sun, could the real motivation behind dropping support for these platforms be a desperate attempt to shore up the market share of the Sun Solaris platform?

What does this announcement mean for IBM i shops that are already using MySQL or have plans to use it?  The DB2 for i Storage Engine for MySQL is owned by IBM and therefore isn’t impacted by any announcement by Oracle. As a matter of fact, there’s a beta program for a new and enhanced version of the IBM DB2 for i Storage Engine going on as we speak.

From what we understand, relatively few of the IBM i shops using MySQL have support contracts in place with MySQL anyway, so for those already using MySQL, this probably has little impact. While the lack of compiled code for the IBM i platform will change the way people get and install the MySQL code, we suspect there may be alternative ways to get the code in the future. We understand discussions are occurring between IBM and Zend to continue providing a source for the MySQL binaries in the future.

PHP adoption on IBM i is strong and continues to grow. MySQL has, of course, never been a requirement for PHP applications, although the availability of the DB2 for i Storage Engine certainly makes it an attractive option. Since both MySQL and the special storage engine can still be used by IBM i shops despite this announcement and since other databases are also available to be used with PHP (including direct support for DB2), we don't foresee Oracle's lack of support having any impact on the rapid adoption rate of PHP on IBM i. PHP fits in very well with the RPG applications that already run, so many business applications on IBM i and has great support from IBM Rochester, Minn.

So, Oracle may not want to play nicely with IBM i shops any more, but MySQL still has a place on IBM i. It will take a lot more than a cold shoulder to keep us away!

Lighten Up, People! (And Get Real)

Last week's blog post stirred up quite a few comments. Not all of them positive, but then we expected that. Perhaps we do sometimes see things through slightly rose-colored glasses, but what we don't understand is what some of the naysayers expect us to say. Has the IBM i platform lost customers in recent years? Absolutely. Is IBM doing everything we'd like to see them do to address this? Frankly, no. But is any of this any reason not to celebrate small triumphs? Particularly ones where IBM has done the right thing and advertised their successes? How long is it since we've seen them do that publicly in relationship to IBM i? Other than just prior to COMMON, that is.

When folks react negatively to stories like this we feel like shouting "Well what the heck do you want us to say? 'The sky is falling, the sky is falling. Abandon hope all ye ...' " Would that be better? We don't want to be cheerleaders for IBM i no matter what is happening in the world. It's not our job. But we do believe that, in the midst of all the gloom and doom, when we encounter good news it's worth celebrating.

Do one or two pieces of good news mean we'll abandon all attempts to persuade RPGers to update their skills? Learn new languages? Modernize their applications? Of course not. We've been doing it for some 20-plus years now and see no reason to change. We've taught RPGers modern RPG practices, SQL, XML, HTML, CSS, Java, and PHP to name but a few. We'll continue doing so.

Just to give an example of the type of thinking we really find annoying: Many of the doomsters decry Open Access for RPG as too little too late. One gentleman recently spent about 10 minutes telling us why OA was a complete waste of time. We pointed out that it could indeed handle most of the scenarios he described, and asked if he had seen actually seen the demos of what Profound Logic (for example) has achieved using it. He admitted that he hadn't even seen it. There's much of that kind of criticism around. Many bemoan the fact that OA doesn't have the right architectural model to underpin today's applications. Frankly, so what? If it is the "right model" that has resulted in some of the pathetic Web apps that we have to work with every day, then that may be even be a good thing. But more to the point--why not allow existing programmers to utilize a familiar model while moving into new territory? Isn't that how they will best learn what the deficiencies are of that model? In fact, as we have said many times, it's been the fact that PHP has allowed us to build on our "old" skills that's made it so attractive to us.

Another problem is the naivete of those who assume just because they can learn new skills at the drop of a hat everyone else can too. It just isn't realistic. Looking at even moderately complex SQL statements makes Jon's head hurt! Similarly, we both know if we focused on nothing but Java for the next three to six months, then we would probably "get it" and be able to move forward in that world. But we haven't that time, and we have seen far too many people fail at the transition to think that there's a viable shortcut for most people. Maybe in time we'll get comfortable enough with OO in PHP to slide into Java that way. Who knows.

So here's our request. How about some solid, practical options for modernizing existing applications or practices? Ones that our readers may actually be able to sell to their management. Not Tools/Languages like Ruby or Python that are neither mainstream enough or supported by IBM on the platform. Maybe they should be, but that's not the point. We'd like these dreams to be espoused in practical terms--Terms that reflect the reality of the size and existing skill set of most RPG shops.

Stream of Consciousness

One thing has become obvious in the past 30 minutes: sitting and staring at this metaphorical "blank sheet of paper" isn't getting the blog done. It's strange that some days the words seem to come flowing out so freely that you have to force yourself to stop, and then there are the days like today where there should be a lot to say, but it just won't gel. Maybe what we need is a stream-of-consciousness approach! So here goes ...
 
A Contest: "Who Wrote That?"

This is a question we're often asked since, as those of you who follow our rantings on a regular basis know, the vast majority of our articles and blog posts are written under the dual byline of Jon and Susan. Of course you hopefully also realize that fitting four hands onto a single keyboard isn't practical. And, even if it were a really big keyboard, synchronizing our thoughts to such an extent that we could jointly type the piece would indeed be an amazing feat. It's only during our "All in Your Mind" presentation that we get into reading minds to that degree! So normally our method is for one of us to be the lead writer and the other to pull it to pieces, er, rather to offer constructive criticisms.

So, this week we've decided to have a contest. We're not sure what the prize will be yet, but it will something fun and/or useful. We have challenged our editors a few times in the past to identify who wrote what, and they often score better than 80 percent. That's why Evelyn Hoover and Tami Deedrick are barred from this contest; they know us too well, although we can still fool them sometimes. So that's the challenge we're setting for you this week: To identify which of us originally wrote which blog post. And just to give you a hint, there are a few that were genuinely written by both of us where we each contributed a section. The winner will be the reader who correctly identifies the largest number of blog posts for IBM Systems Magazine.

And now back to our regularly scheduled broadcast ...

SPECIAL files, RPG Open Access, COMMON, etc.

We've been thinking a lot about SPECIAL files lately. We've been interested in SPECIAL files for a long time and writing about it since at least 2001. Our interest was rekindled when we became aware of IBM's plans for RPG Open Access (OA) and realized that, as with any new feature, many folks wouldn't be able to use it for a while because they were still on a V5 release. However, in the surge of publicity that would accompany the announce, we guessed there would inevitably be comparisons between OA Handlers and SPECIAL files and that might awaken interest in the community. Sure enough, that has in fact happened and it has been interesting to see how many RPGers are unaware of this long-standing feature of the language.

We wrote about it most recently in March and May's Extra will continue that journey. We have also found that a little Googling around reveals a number of other articles describing a variety of uses for SPECIAL files ranging from IFS file handling to replacing Open Query file (by using SQL under the covers) and more. We're going to try and collect these articles and build a reference list on our website. We'll let you know more when we get that done.

COMMON has come and gone, and it did feel strange not to be there this year. But we were there in spirit in a couple of ways. Those of you who attend COMMON are familiar with the ribbons that speakers and volunteers have on their badges. Since we couldn't be there we decided that we would contribute some additional ribbons. So if you were at COMMON in Orlando and saw someone wearing a ribbon with wording such as "Bored Member," "Worker Bee" or "My Ribbon is Better Than Yours,"  then you now know where they came from. Many thanks to our friend Dr. Franken-- aka Larry Bolhuis --for distributing those for us.

Jon was also present at COMMON in the form of a Skype pop-up during one of Mike Pavlak's sessions. Mike had forgotten to turn off Skype. Good thing Jon wasn't saying anything rude or confidential!

We were glad to see that the buzz around OA continued at COMMON with looksoftware announcing their OA offering and Profound Logic announcing that they'll be making their version available to V5R3 and V5R4 customers via a pre-processor. Clever idea. Hopefully other vendors will soon announce their own exploitations of OA.

A number of people have asked us if we think that OA has been over-hyped. Maybe it has. There is, after all, no such thing as a silver bullet. But it has created a buzz and interest in Web apps that we haven't seen in the IBM i community for many years. If it helps to wake up the "5250 is good enough" crowd who diminish the reputation of our favorite system by continuing along their path to extinction, then we're all for it. We all need a little hype sometimes, and what's wrong with RPG being "sexy" for once?

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.