October 1998

• Introduction to the Last Date Routines You'll Ever Need - Introduction to a series of Date Routines
• The Last Date Routines You'll Ever Need -- Part 1 - End your search for date handling routines! A series of articles will present a set of RPG programs to cover dates from January 1, 1, to December 31, 1999.
• The Last Date Routines You'll Ever Need -- Part 2 - Keep "up to date" with our series on date-handling routines for business applicaitons.
• The Last Date Routines You'll Ever Need -- Part 3 - In this installment of our series on date routines, you learn the coding details of date data types, arithmetic operations, and extract operations.
• The Last Date Routines You'll Ever Need -- Part 4 - Understand the details of the RPG date routines that parse and format dates.
• In This Issue -
• Letters -
• Six Hours and Fifteen Minutes in Germany - Bob Tipton's whirlwind trip to Europe revealed IBM doing something highly creative and successful to promote Domino on the AS/400 there. Will IBM North America follow suit?
• The Real Reason To Be Mad at Microsoft - Roger Pence writes that while IBM works at Windows NT integration, Microsoft ignores the AS/400.
• Introducing the New LZ1 - IBM's Frank Soltis explains how the LZ1 compression algorithm gives the AS/400 fast, efficient, and extremely reliable disk compression, and he covers IBM's Hierarchical Storage Management (HSM) function, new with V4R3.
• Encapsulation Puts Year 2000 Problem on Hold - Need a quick fix for your Y2K woes? Subtracting 28 years from your dates can buy you a little time, says Brendan O'Connell of Millennium Solutions.
• Newswatch -
• October Marks the End of the Line for V3R1 and V3R6 - Pam Jones reports on the impact of IBM's impending withdrawal of support for V3R1 and V3R6. The support schedule, along with the approach of the year 2000, could boost V4 upgrades.
• Keeping Up With Downtime - Richard Gould discusses how high-availability solutions provide a safety net for planned and unplanned downtime, ease upgrade transitions, and distribute workload across multiple servers.
• Ensuring a Happy Ending to Printer Problems - John Ghrist describes how Republic Indemnity Company of America solved the problem of supporting printers at six different sites by using Lexmark's Optra S laser printers equipped with 5250 print servers.
• The Pro Card: A Winner in the Procurement Game - Nahid Jilovec describes a powerful new e-commerce tool, the procurement card, which lets businesses automate the procurement cycle and save significant time and money.
• The Seven Deadly Traps of ILE - Bryan Meyers explains how to avoid programming pitfalls to make ILE your development environment of choice.
• Watch Out for Activation Groups - Once you begin programming in an ILE language such as RPG IV, you can't avoid the impact of activation groups, even if you decide you don't need their benefits. Mike Cravitz discusses the benefits and pitfalls of this aspect of ILE.
• Using Varying-Length Character Strings in RPG IV - V4R2's support for varying-length character data types makes working with strings much easier. In this article, Hans Boldt describes how to work with character strings in RPG, with an emphasis on the new varying-length data types.
• Inside the RPG IV Tools Toolkit - Julian Monypenny describes the content, use, and architecture of the RPG IV Tools toolkit, which provides the horsepower behind the utilities in his RPG IV Tools series.
• Five Tips for Writing Efficient Program & Procedure Prototypes - Barbara Morris explains how to use savvy parameter passing and varying-length fields to write elegant, efficient ILE RPG code.
• DB2 for AS/400 Keeps Rolling in V4R3 - Hard on the heels of V4R2, V4R3 is also crammed with enhancements to DB2/400. Vector indexes, SQL aliases, and performance improvements are just a few of those Kent Milligan lists in this summary.
• VisualAge for Java 2.0 Sneak Peek - Dan Darnell looks at a beta copy of the new version of IBM's Java development environment and finds improved Java language support, support for multiple programmers, and well-integrated AS/400 tools.
• Java's Arrays and Strings - In this Java for RPG Programmers article, IBMers George Farr and Phil Coulthard tell about Java's special support for the heavily used array and string objects.
• Touring LANSA for the Web - In this screen tour, Jim Hoopes explains how to use the Lansa for the Web development tool to build the starting point for an AS/400 e-commerce Web site.
• Data Conversions Without Programming - Scott Steinacher explains how to use data scripting software to convert data from PC programs for use in AS/400 applications without manual data entry or custom programs.
• Programmer's Notes - Jef Sutherland offers "short takes" on RPG, DDS, and CL programming topics for readers looking for brief, useful tips. This month's topics: RPG constants, DDS's nondisplay and protect attributes, and CL concatenation.
• New Operations Navigator Puts a Graphical Face on More AS/400 Functions - IBMers Joe DiCecco and Earl Emerick explain the latest Operations Navigator enhancements, including a custom-install option, a centralized systems management tool, and a security wizard.
• IP Addressing: Getting from Here to There on the Internet - IBM networking consultant Laura Knapp explains Internet Protocol architecture and how IP addressing routes information packets among networks.
• Put Telnet Exit Points to Work - You've heard that the V4R2 Telnet exit points let you assign a specific virtual device to a session and determine whether users can bypass the OS/400 sign-on panel. Now see how it's done. IBMer Jeffrey Stevens describes the exit points and their parameters, tells how to register and secure an exit program, briefly describes exception handling, and allays performance concerns.
• Tech Corner -
• Security FAQs -
• Does Client Access support Windows 98? -
• New Products & Services -
• Buyers Guide: AS/400 System Monitoring Tools - You've heard that the V4R2 Telnet exit points let you assign a specific virtual device to a session and determine whether users can bypass the OS/400 sign-on panel. Now see how it's done. IBMer Jeffrey Stevens describes the exit points and their parameters, tells how to register and secure an exit program, briefly describes exception handling, and allays performance concerns.
• Street Talk -
• I understand Operations Navigator (which is a subset of the Client Access for Windows Family product -
• I’ve been out of touch with AS/400 security for a few years. How can I find out what’s been added in -
• After I create a user profile with *JOBCTL special authority only, I receive a message that says, “U -
• We’re a 24x7 shop, so our applications run continuously. Because the files in the applications are a -
• When I create user profiles via Operations Navigator, some of the parameters I’m used to seeing on t -
• Finding Your AS/400 Client/Server Jobs -
• Retrieve End Code from a Job Log -
• Accessing a DB2/400 Member via Query and ODBC -
• Externally Described Printer Files -
• Checking for the Existence of an IFS File -
• Remote Output Queues -
• SBMJOB Parameters -
• SQL/400 Equivalents to Oracle -
• JBuilder/400 Client/Server Suite 2.0 -