April 2007

• Industry Observer - A Business View of Outsourcing; Telecommuting Pros and Cons; RFID Update; Research for Your Inner Geek
• SCM Solutions That Work with WDSc - If you're using WebSphere Development Studio client (WDSc) to do application development, or even thinking seriously about it, WDSc-friendly plug-ins in these software configuration management (SCM) products can help you access SCM functions from within WDSc.
• Oldies but Goodies - The mainframe has managed not only to survive but also to garner renewed interest.
• Feedback -
• Knock ’em Dead: Tips on the Winning Interview - The killer résumé may have gotten your foot in the door, but you still have to prove yourself during an interview to get the job. The keys are preparation and a few techniques to win over the hiring manager.
• What QShell and PASE Can Do for You - QShell and PASE are Unix-like environments that run under i5/OS on your System i. Get an overview of what these tools are and how they differ from each other. Even better, find out how you can use these free i5/OS components — and why you should want to!
• WDSc Lite and Other Oxymorons - Though WDSc is a great tool, it includes too much clutter. And WDSc Lite does little, if anything, to clear the excess and separate itself from the full version. To make WDSc Lite a truly useful product, IBM needs to revise its idea of “lite.”
• 4 Almost Foolproof Programmer Tests - What does a Logitech mouse have in common with a Starbucks coffee order? They both can help you assess members of your dev team. Here are four tests for zeroing in on the strengths and weaknesses of your coders.
• Hush My e-Mouth - The latest crop of security products for System i covers a spectrum of data encryption, e-mail policy enforcement, file transfer protection, and system access controls.
• Use SAX and the XML Toolkit to Process XML with RPG - The Simple API for XML (SAX) is an elegantly intuitive alternative to the memory-intensive Document Object Model (DOM) API that comes with the XML Toolkit. Learn the differences and decide which will work best for you.
• IT Is Accessible - New technologies and a supportive business climate are enabling people with disabilities to get programming jobs — and older workers to keep them.
• Bootstrap Your e-Business Website with Websydian Express - If your enterprise needs to develop an e-business website in a hurry, or without much in-house web expertise, Websydian A/S's Websydian Express can get a site in place with nothing more than developer RPG experience.
• f.y.iSystem - System i Print Users Will Be in Good Hands with Ricoh; Innovation Keeps IBM at Top of Hardware Vendor List; iSociety Members Chat with Shearer About All Things i; Acquisition Follow-Up: Vision Solutions and iTera
• Hot New Products -
• IBM Announcements -
• 25th Anniversary Celebration: An April Fools Retrospective - System iNEWS's 25-year history includes 18 years of April Fools humor. Enjoy this sampler of drollery from the vaults.
• What’s New in WDSc for iSeries V7.0 - It's been a year since the release of WDSc V6.0.1, but the WDSc development team has not been sitting idle. IBM was listening to your requests (and sometimes complaints) and has been busy adding some of the many features you asked for.
• What Does V5R4 Offer Journal and Commit Users? - With new enhancements in V5R4, journaling and commit control are more powerful than ever. Learn the new keywords, commands, and techniques that V5R4 offers.
• Basics of Using WDSc: 5 Must-Knows for Debugging in WDSc - Many programmers and developers know that WDSc is a great tool for debugging. But you may not know about these five helpful debugging gems.
• The Power of a Click - With WDSc and the proper setup, you can set your development environment, run an application, and compile applications. And you can do all this with only a couple of clicks.
• Discover WDSc’s Web Interaction Wizard - The WDSc Web Interaction wizard can build a browser-based interface for a simple RPG batch application in an hour or two. With this tool, it's a snap to move from traditional green-screen RPG development to slick browser-based, web-enabled applications.
• Testing RPG-based Stored Procedures with RPG - You can easily turn an RPG program into a stored procedure, but it's important to unit test your RPG and SQL result sets before passing them to web developers. How? iUnit now has the ability to test SQL result sets returned from RPG.
• Dynamic SQL Techniques - The SQL program ITS00187R2 makes dynamic column selection easy, and you can do it from all sorts of programs. It can work with RPG III as well as RPG IV. But you may want to get deeper into the programming to get around its limitations.
• Dr. I Doctor - Dr. I Doctor discusses an i5/OS-compatible Intrusion Detection System (IDS), and describes a useful free tool for data center design.
• Troubleshooting TCP/IP: Unleash the Power of the QSPTLIB Support Library - In a perfect world, IBM would send a skilled engineer to your site to perform hands-on troubleshooting for networking problems. Unfortunately, we don't live in a perfect world. The tools in the QSPTLIB offer you the next best thing.
• Understanding Disk Performance, Part 2: Disk Operation on i5/OS - Part of understanding disk performance is knowing how the control and data flow for i5/OS disk access works. Here's a description of what goes on under the covers when your data starts moving.
• Killer Club Tech - Database Access from CL with SQL CLI; Restrict a User to Signing on Only at Certain Times; The Hunt for the Mysterious Disk Eaters!
• COMMON Preview: Q&A with COMMON President Randy Dufault - Find out what's in store at COMMON Anaheim.
• The Essential Guide to EDI Security - A baffling array of electronic barriers and locks are required to keep wandering eyes from viewing sensitive documents. This Essential Guide shows the protocols, techniques, and software to become familiar with on your journey to secure EDI.
• April Fools Videos - Every year, our April Fool frolic seizes on some cultural or computer-related phenomenon to blow out of proportion. This year is no exception as we honor both the emergence of YouTube as a social phenomenon and IBM's recent stab at video marketing with some videos of our own that celebrate the System i's vaunted reputation for reliability.