The Summit in the Corral

Sorry we didn’t get to “chat” with you all last week ‑ we were so tied up running our RPG & DB2 Summit in Dallas that the blog fell by the wayside.

We thoroughly enjoyed the Summit. Getting together with more than 150 of our fellow IBM i aficionados is always invigorating, particularly when folks come up to you after one of your sessions and tell you that the information “more than paid for the whole event.” When we first arrived at the hotel though we did begin to wonder how things were going to turn out. This picture will give you a good idea why:

This is what we found in the ballroom one evening! This beautiful Texas Longhorn and about 99 friends were being auctioned off. Cattle in a hotel ballroom? Yup ‑ we were in Texas after all. But not just any cattle ‑ these were very expensive breeding stock. Top price paid for a bull was apparently just shy of $500,000 and the top cow went for about $340,000. Don’t think anyone is planning on turning them into burgers any time soon! We took a lot of photos of these beautiful creatures out in the rear parking lot (which had been turned into a stockyard) and will pass the link along in a future blog post once they have all been uploaded.

We had been assured that the cleanup on Sunday would remove all trace (including smells) of the cattle. We really had our doubts about that when we came downstairs for breakfast on Sunday morning! It seemed a little like eating breakfast in a barn ‑ not that Susan has ever done that, but she can now imagine what it might be like.

Turned out the hotel’s cleanup plans were based in part on the assumption that they would be able to have the rear doors open all day Sunday. The weather however had other ideas and the wind direction rendered that impossible. By the time our Monday Headstart sessions came around, there was certainly still an interesting aroma around the place. But the hotel moved us to rooms a little further from the problem so it was definitely tolerable. By the time the Summit proper started on Tuesday, the smell was all but eliminated and all went ahead as planned. By the end of the week, you’d never have known that the cattle had ever been there. But we still nicknamed our main meeting room as “the Corral” for the week in honor of the earlier inhabitants of the room.

Before we close, an update on a completely different note. Back in December, we blogged about “The Hour of Code.” In that piece, we mentioned that a version of the graphical programming language Scratch from MIT was used in the tutorial. This week we saw on KickStarter a new project established to fund ScratchJr ‑ a new version of Scratch aimed at children 5 - 7 years of age. If you think that is too young to be able to program then all we can say is “Watch the video.” The project has already met its funding goal for producing the iPad version. If they get enough additional funding they will be producing a version for Android and add features to allow the sharing of ScratchJr projects with friends and family. They will also be able to create additional resources for parents and teachers.

We think this is a fabulous project well worth our support. We encourage you, our readers, to also chip in a few dollars to support this effort. We need more kids who can think logically. ScratchJr can help achieve that.

 

 

It's a Good News Week!

Good news? Really? Looking at today's news, it is hard to believe there is any good news to be found. But this spring is indeed bringing a much needed batch of good news to the IBM i community.

What news? Well we are currently at the WMCPA annual conference and are absolutely delighted to see that attendance is at a much higher level than it has been in recent years. Not only that but they have set new records for vendor and sponsor participation.

From here we go directly to Dallas for our spring RPG & DB2 Summit. We are also seeing a significant increase in attendance for that event. Indeed, we ran out of space for exhibitors and even closed registration recently for fear that overcrowding could impact the comfortable, interactive feel of the event.

We are also hearing similar good news from organizers of other upcoming conferences like NEUGC and TUG TEC. From what we hear, COMMON's spring event is also seeing a similar resurgence in numbers.

This is good news for two reasons. First, it is indicative that the economy is turning around and companies are beginning to invest again. Second, and more importantly for us, it means they are investing in their IBM i assets! And that has to be good news for all of us.

But this is no time to breathe a sigh of relief and relax. This may be a limited-time opportunity. For now, IBM i shops seem to be investing in what they have and in finding out what they could be doing. But unless we "carpe diem" and get rapidly involved in modernizing our applications and development practices we may well miss the boat. If we do not respond to the needs of the business, we will find ourselves once again having to defend against other inferior "solutions." For inspiration, take a look at our previous blog post about surprising your users. 

So now is a good time to tell you the other piece of good news. The draft version of the new Application Modernization Redbooks publication is going to be available "any day now" -- Tim Rowe of IBM just told the audience at WMCPA so it must be true. He even had a printed copy with him; it is about the size of a large telephone directory and there's still a bit more content to come.

So it is a good news week. Make the most of it -- go out and DO something!

Adding Web Tooling to RDi

We recently had an email from a fellow RDi user asking if we knew what had happened to the HTML editing capabilities that had been in WDSC. He had not needed to use them since switching to RDi and now needed to use them. The simple answer, sadly, is that when IBM made the move from WDSC to the RDx versions, the additional Web tooling was dropped from the base package. We blogged about it a while back. The tooling has always remained available but in the higher priced configurations of Rational Developer.

After further research to establish that nothing was available in the basic RDi tooling, we went in search of some Eclipse plugins. Our initial attempts were not very helpful as "HTML" as a keyword to search the Eclipse market brings up hundreds of options. Not only that, but as it happens RDi is not based on the latest-and-greatest version of Eclipse (Kepler), but on the previous version (Juno). This increased the difficulty of the search. Another challenge is that it wasn't immediately obvious to us which of the tools was free and which for-fee. So, we did what we often do under such circumstances and reached out to the RDi community on midrange.com to see what others were using.

Several people suggested that we install the Eclipse Web Tools Platform extension to give us both HTML and additional Java capabilities, so that's the direction we chose. But that still left the "How" part and although we have done this before, each version of Eclipse is a little different. That's when another suggestion from the RDi group helped out. This time they pointed us to the Useful Stuff blog, which provided step-by-step instructions with images for _exactly_ what we needed. We followed the instructions and it worked beautifully.

Of course it's always dangerous to let Jon lose on anything like this as he inevitably gets into "Ooo, that looks interesting" mode. This time he decided that while he was extending his workbench he should try adding some PHP support. He's been using both Zend Studio and the PHP version of NetBeans, but thought it would be nice to have a single IDE for those times when he's working on a project that uses PHP, HTML and RPG. Because Zend Studio is based on the Eclipse PHP Development Tools project (PDT), it would (or should) be a familiar environment and indeed that is the way it turned out. For those of you thinking of following in his footsteps, we offer one word of caution: To find the PHP tools you can filter for "PHP" (just as the Useful stuff blog suggested you filter for "Web" earlier,) but when you do, you'll see two sets of options. You do _not_ want the ones identified as SDK. Just pick the three items identified simply as PHP Development Tools (PDT) and all will be well.

Once we have had a chance to work a little more with these Web tools we'll report back. In the meantime if you find any other Eclipse projects that are useful for RDi users, please let us know. We are already familiar with those from SoftLanding and TaskForce's iSphere  (which we hope to review soon) but are always happy to hear of others via the comments section.