August 2007

• Industry Observer -
• My Journey into VoIP - Given an Internet connection’s sporadic nature, what happens when you use it for a service that requires guaranteed bandwidth and guaranteed uptime?
• WDSc 7: The 2 Answers You Need to Get Started - If you’ve wondered how to get and install WDSc V7, wonder no more. This article addresses these two areas.
• When Disaster Strikes - Recent improvements in server and storage technology have made disaster recovery more accessible and less expensive. Which trends are worth investing in, and which are more hyperbolic than helpful?
• f.y.iSystem - Doom, Gloom, and Better Numbers; The System i and the Future of Rewards; Can Your i Get Any Greener?; Secure Perspective Enters the World
• IBM Announcements -
• WDSc 7.0 Brouhaha Revealed - With WDSc 7.0, IBM believed it had delivered a fresh batch of chocolate-chip-cookie goodness. Then came the Advanced Edition with its exclusive Screen Designer component and nary a crumb for System i developers.
• A Thoroughly “Modern” Muddle - “Application Modernization” is a term that’s become stretched to mean GUI-fied, browser-friendly, componentized for SOA, and even Java-based, and that’s just for starters. Has it become a term that really means nothing because it refers to too much?
• Hot New Products -
• Business Etiquette for Nerds - Cultivate your sense of business etiquette with three simple tenets.
• Understanding VoIP - Voice over IP has become the de facto replacement technology for traditional Private Branch Exchange (PBX) phone systems in the enterprise. Learn the nuts and bolts of VoIP operation and find out how to successfully deploy it in your organization.
• Zend and the Art of Web App Construction - PHP is the System i’s newest language and helps simplify web application development. Zend Technologies, Inc.’s Zend for i5/OS provides both a development and an administrative environment for PHP-based applications.
• RPG Comprehension Tools Product Roundup - Maintenance for existing applications and auditing requirements often require diagnosis of how a program is already functioning. Here are 30 tools that can help developers better understand and document RPG source code.
• Grokking Software Development - The ability to read and comprehend existing code is critical to a programmer’s success. But do you really know how to read programs? Fully comprehending, or grokking, code is the best way to understand programs and learn new technologies.
• WDSc and Code Comprehension: A Natural Fit - WDSc contains an abundance of features to help you ramp up your productivity. Using these five code comprehension features will make your code easier to view, navigate, and find.
• Search Source Code with Regular Expressions - Do you frequently search source code for strings or patterns? Searching just got easier and more effective with WDSc’s new interface, which supports regular expressions. Learn how to use this to your advantage and add value to your searches.
• Dynamic Memory for the CL Programmer - A major V5R4 enhancement lets a CL program easily work with quantities of data that are known only at runtime. Learn how to use dynamically allocated memory to hold a variable amount of data and how to then process that data within a CL program.
• Still Green After All These Years - At times, you likely still use the green screen for tasks such as navigating the system and changing, compiling, and debugging code. The PPM and PPMJ utilities aggregate these common tools into a simple green-screen interface for RPG and Java developers.
• Calling RPG from SQL: External UDFs to Extend SQL - UDFs provide a simple way to invoke RPG procedure functions from within SQL. And they're not hard to write once you've done a few. After you've coded a UDF, it can be invoked from any SQL statement that is going to run on the System i where the RPG exists.
• Guide to IFS Reclaim - The need for IFS reclaim is rare, but when it happens, it can cause a bit of system management pain. This article shows how V5R4 enhancements provide some relief and outlines the IFS reclaim process.
• Managing Restricted Commands - The Restricted Command utility suite consists of two separate tools: Work with Restricted Commands (WRKRSTCMD) and Execute Restricted Command (EXCRSTCMD). These utilities let users execute “restricted commands” under certain circumstances.
• Control Runaway Queries - Don’t try to stop a runaway train; it just isn’t going to end well. You can, however, stop runaway SQL queries by using APIs. Follow these three easy steps to identify and control runaway queries.
• Monitor Messages and Run Automation in IBM Director - To keep track of your i5/OS environment, it’s important to monitor for critical messages and be able to automatically trigger certain events. IBM Director lets you do that, as well as tie in all your Management Central monitors to boot.
• Pros and Cons of Incremental Backups - It might seem that incremental backups are the natural choice in today’s on-demand environment. However, you must carefully consider your unique situation to determine what backup route is best for you.
• Killer Club Tech - Find Objects in QGPL or QUSRSYS Not from IBM; Convert Data to UCS2 or UTF-16; What Can You Do with the Attention Key?; Just the Digits, Please!; iSeries Query: Ignoring Field Case When Selecting Records
• Dr. I Doctor - Dr. I Doctor explains how to monitor traffic for a specific IP address, and helps troubleshoot SQL replication-over-WAN failures.
• Harvest Call Stack Information - Call stacks track which programs and procedures are currently active in jobs. These two handy procedures use call stacks to provide useful information to an ILE program.
• Route Finder: Query and Reporting Tools - The wrong query and reporting tool will leave you stalled at the gate -- check under the hood to make sure you're driving a winner.