Hear Ye, Hear Ye! It's Announcement Time!

We had an unexpected week off last week due to some issues related to a DDoS attack on the blogging platform's server. Did you miss us? We know a few people did because they wrote to us, which was nice, but we're back now and just in time for the 7.2 announcement, which took place yesterday (Monday, April 28).

In all honesty, the first thing we should point out is that there is very little new RPG content in this release. And most of what is there will probably not immediately impact the majority of you as it relates to CCSID conversions. As Barbara Morris pointed out to us when we discussed this topic in Toronto last week, "You had your presents early, you can't expect to still get another great big gift now." Of course the "present" that she was referring to was the introduction of completely free-form RPG that debuted back with TR7 at the end of 2013. The best part of getting our present "early" was that more of us can get our hands on it now, as the support made it into V7.1. Much better than having to wait until the shop installs 7.2. We'll be experimenting with some of the new 7.2 options as soon as we can get our hands on an upgraded system to see how many of the issues relating to UTF-8 fields 7.2 helps resolve. You can read Barbara's take on the enhancements here.

In fact the only non-CCSID enhancements relate to the ability to control the length of the year portion returned by a %SUBDT. In addition you can also specify the number of fractional seconds in a timestamp. However, this enhancement is really only for external compatibility. RPG will still only populate the same amount of data--we just get more zeroes!

For RSE users, RDi V9.1 was also announced yesterday. The biggest item in the new release is a code coverage tool for testing. You can test your programs and the tool will tell you which lines of code were executed--or perhaps more importantly, which were not executed! Initially it will work only for testing programs in batch but we're hoping it will offer more options in the future.

Also in the new release is yet more proof of how important it is to let IBM know what features you want to see in the future. Several popular Requests for Enhancement (RFEs) were answered with this release. Two of them related to one of our all-time favorite features--the Outline view. The RFEs asked for searching or filtering on items such as field names in the outline, so in 9.1 there's a search box at the top of the outline similar to the one in the Preferences dialog.

The RDi F1 help key will now recognize BIFs and keywords (hurray!) and the wizards for procedures, D specs and Java method calls now have the option to generate code using the new all-free format syntax introduced a few months ago.

So what else is there in 7.2 that is likely to be of interest to developers? Well for one thing the IBM i Integrated Application Server is now powered by Liberty 8.5, the latest app server from the Websphere folks. IBM feels that this will be a good replacement for Tomcat. It is also upward compatible to full Websphere, which means that your experimental use today will not have to be rethought if and when you need to "move up." Although 7.2 marks the public debut of Liberty on IBM i, it has actually been in use under the covers by a number of IBM tools since 2013 so any rough edges should have been worn off by now. Also of interest to the Java aficionados among you, 7.2 introduces a new version of the JT400 Open Lite toolkit aimed firmly at the mobile market.

Those of you that develop Web applications will be pleased to see an update in the Apache server, which takes it to version 2.4 with improved performance and support for Server Name Indication (SNI) and
Online Certificate Status Protocol (OCSP). We know many folks have been waiting for those to appear.

There are too many DB2 enhancements to cover here so we will simply refer you to Mike Cain's blog for more information on those. We also that know many of you make extensive use of the browser based Navigator, Tim Rowe's blog covers the new features in detail.

As and when we get to play with 7.2 we'll be back with more. In the meantime try to be grateful for the presents you've already had.

Are You LinkedIn?

When the invitations to join LinkedIn (LI) first started to roll in we checked it out. Because we had no intention of looking for a new job and felt that we already had most of the connections that we were likely to need, we didn't join up for quite a while. But the invitations kept coming and a number of friends told us they had made some very useful contacts through LI, so we finally gave in and joined.

Here we are some two-plus years later and we're still trying to figure out if it's worth the effort. An abundance of completely overlapping public groups related to IBM i and IBM i development exist, making it difficult to even try to follow a subset of them, which requires sifting through numerous posts that are often repetitious. Some days, it seems that for every useful piece of information that filters through to us via the various groups we have joined there are at least 50 pieces of junk. Many of them don't even reach the "thinly disguised" category of advertising. Admittedly much of this appears to be due to failures on the part of the person(s) who initiated the group to moderate the posts. Another problem is that LI doesn't really seem to provide a good mechanism whereby such groups can be flagged as the spam generators they have become.

Where LI seems to work better is with private groups, such as the one we run for our own RPG & DB2 Summit Alumni. Only those who have attended a Summit are eligible to join. It allows us to give them a vehicle for asking questions of the Summit speakers post-conference. This is a big improvement over private emails for two reasons. First some attendees are reluctant to "waste the time" of speakers by sending emails. Second, the questions and answers are visible to all members, potentially creating more discussion.

Of course, it's also a vehicle for Summit alumni to discuss things with each other. We are often asked to share email addresses for Summit attendees so that they can continue the collaborations and relationships begun at the Summit. Our privacy policy doesn't allow that, so instead we send out invitations after each Summit event to join the alumni LI group. Other members often contribute to answering questions and sharing experiences. That helps build the community. Of course we could achieve all of this and more besides by simply hosting our own Q and A forums and indeed may do just that in the future.

While LI may be a reasonable vehicle for private groups, it doesn't seem to be a good solution for the kinds of technical questions typically (and more appropriately, we think) asked on forums, bulletin boards and mailing lists. The problem with using LI groups for this is that often the person with the question (or comment or article) decides to post it in several different groups. And/or a similar question gets posted by different people on different groups. This leads to repetition and inconsistency of responses. If you doubt this, try googling something that you know to be the title of a LI article and see what you get. In our experience even adding site:linkedin.com to the search doesn't help.

So do you find benefit in LI? It can be helpful to stay in touch with people who may have changed jobs. And it can be useful to learn of news in the community. But the proliferation of overlapping groups for IBM i/RPG/DB2 groups makes it a bit hit or miss as a news vehicle.

If you've found some better uses for LinkedIn, please let us know, because right now the cost-benefit ratio seems slewed to us.

P.S. Speaking of technical forums, in last week's blog we mentioned that Penton's iProDeveloper forums had gone read-only. We're glad to report that they now seem to be back on the air, but so far there has been very little traffic.

Just When Things Were Going So Well ...

Back in March we blogged about it being a "Good News Week," so it seems only fair to pass on some bad news.

Last week Penton announced to its subscriber base that the company is ceasing production of its iProDeveloper and Power IT Pro publications. This weekend their forums went read-only. Traffic on the forums had indeed fallen substantially in the last year or two, but frankly we always felt that that was self-inflicted damage. They changed the software they used a few years back and made a complete hash of it. Not only was the new forum truly horrible to use, but they also made a complete mess of linking in the old content. Over time they fixed many of the issues that arose--but in the interim period many folks had "wandered off" and found their technical fixes elsewhere.

We were not really that surprised that Penton pulled the plug on iProDeveloper. There seemed to be less and less content in each issue. In fact with many issues we rarely got beyond scanning the table of contents, there was so little there that interested us.

In part we suspect that this is all related to the vendor consolidation that has been going on in the IBM i space in recent years. When only a relatively small number of vendors own all of the products in the marketplace, it's bound to affect the amount of advertising dollars available. And advertising dollars  drive magazine (print or digital) content. No dollars, no content.

As part of these changes, Penton is making all of the previously restricted content on the website publicly available. How long they will continue this service is anybody's guess. So we suggest that if you have any articles on the iProDeveloper website that you reference frequently that you grab yourself a local copy while you can.

But enough of the bad news. Right now we're off to join a great bunch of fellow IBM i fanatics at the annual NEUGC conference near Boston, Mass. That will make us feel better--at least once we get past the frustration of having had our flight cancelled (sigh)--seems to be be just one of those days.

Advertising IBM i

So, did you see that great TV ad that IBM ran during primetime last night? Some of the things it mentioned were:

• That IBM i has true integration of operating system, database, security and web serving. Designed in from the beginning--not added on as an afterthought. The very same integration that Oracle and others are striving to achieve via acquisition, not by design. True integration brings simplicity and reliability.
• That DB2 for i fully automates many typical DBA tasks, such as storage allocation and extensions, maintaining database integrity, updating statistics. It has tremendous scalability, such as the ability to handle more than 400 TB of data in a single SQL table and can bring incredible I/O and CPU parallelism to bear to process and query massive amounts of data. A simpler, more powerful and more scalable database housed in a single server delivering unprecedented performance at a lower cost for both transactional data and business intelligence applications.
• That reliability and security of IBM i systems running on Power are dramatically better than competitive systems. They mentioned that an independent study showed costs of downtime for IBM i servers to be 90 percent less than for Windows server clusters and 71 percent less than for Oracle Exadata, translating into three-year savings of between $700,000 and $35 million for IBM i shops.
• That SAP runs better on IBM i than on competitive platforms and is easier and cheaper to install and maintain.
• That IBM i has a lower cost of ownership over three years: 55 percent less than Windows running SQL Server and 50 percent less than Linux running Oracle. In addition, even the initial cost of acquisition of IBM i servers is 18 percent less than x86 servers running Windows/SQL Server and 43 percent less than x86 running Linux and Oracle.

Did you notice that today's blog is dated April 1, 2014? Yes, it's April Fool's Day.

Sorry, there was no ad for IBM i on prime time TV last night. But that's the only part of this blog that is not true. So maybe we could all help to make sure that even without ads the IBM i story is heard.

For more details on the facts stated here and more data to use in spreading the word, take a look at some of the resources on the System i Developer iAdvocate page.

Spread the word.