New Champions; New Products

Last week's COMMON event was memorable in many ways--not the least of them being our rather
protracted trip home. The journey took more than 28 hours and left us with less than 20 hours before we left again for our next trip. Serves us right for wanting to go home and do the laundry at least!

One of the highlights of the week occurred during the conference's opening session when IBM announced the latest inductees into the ranks of IBM Champions for Power Systems. Three of our favorite IBM i friends--Scott Klement, Aaron Bartell and Jim Buck--were added to the list and we couldn't be happier. All of them have done so much to promote IBM i on Power and, in particular, to demonstrate just how far you can go with RPG. The page hasn't been updated yet, but eventually they should be appearing on the "Meet the Champions" page. Jon is hopeful Aaron might support his proposal that the champions be known as "Power Rangers." Susan, however, is less than thrilled with this idea.  

Not only was Scott named a "Champion" but he was also named this year's recipient of the Al Barsa Memorial Scholarship, which "honors an individual who exemplifies Al's commitment and dedication to the i community, is a mentor to others and is an advocate to the i community." We don't think you could write a better description of Scott if you tried--other than perhaps to add that he is also a terrific educator, dedicated father and train lover.

We're delighted to note that both Aaron and Scott will be speaking at our upcoming RPG & DB2 Summit in Minneapolis, so if you want to congratulate them both in person you could join us there.

New Products

We mentioned in a previous blog that we had had a sneak peek at a new product in the IBM i market that intrigued us and that we'd tell you more later. As it turns out there were such a wealth of new application-development products and major enhancements to existing ones announced during COMMON that we don't feel we can do them justice within this blog. Instead we are going to spend a little more time getting to know more about them and then we'll write a product roundup in a few weeks in IBM i EXTRA. If you want to be sure you don't miss it, you can subscribe on the IBM Systems Magazine website.

We will just briefly mention two that caught our eye. The first is the new Long Range product from Lansa. This product is targeted fair and square at the mobile market and is quite a departure for the company in that it not only supports use from Lansa, but also has an RPG version that allows you to write native mobile applications using RPG. The second involves Profound Logic's UI builder, which can now be used from other languages in addition to its role as providing the UI interface for Profound's RPG Open Access product. The initial roll-out demonstrates its use with PHP, which as regular readers know is a favorite of ours, but the company plans to document the tooling for use from any mainstream language on virtually any platform.

We'd like to mention more but you'll just have to wait for the IBM i EXTRA article to appear. There are just too many to talk about. We certainly live in interesting times.