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Retrospective: A Decade of i

Our memories of the last 10 years

YiPs

While no one can replace the individuals we’ve lost in the last 10 years, the community has continued to grow and strengthen. A new branch of the family was born in the last decade in the form of the Young i Professionals, the self-proclaimed “Future of the IBM i Platform.”

And what a future it promises to be! The YiPs team has set up an Open Source Sandbox so IBM i professionals of all ages can try their hand at some of the free applications available, such as SugarCRM, Mantis/400 and WebERP. They’re all up and running on IBM i and accessible via your browser. Currently, the YiPs are working on a Virtual Learning Center. They also have some exciting open-source initiatives unique to IBM i underway. The members participate in many conferences and user groups and are tireless crusaders for the platform. They collect and publish stories about all the cool things the platform can do. Want to learn more about the aforementioned connection between IBM i and iPhone? Go to the YiPs site and search for iPhone. After spending a short time in the virtual community of the YiPs, you begin to realize there’s almost nothing this platform can’t do. The YiPs don’t just talk about what it can do—they prove it.

PHP and MySQL

In April 2006, IBM and Zend jointly announced that they would be bringing PHP to the (then) System i. For those of us who wanted a Web-oriented programming language, and for whom Java just didn’t work, PHP was (and is) a breath of fresh air. We felt at the time that PHP would be a better choice for most RPGers than Java and our experiences in teaching PHP on customer sites and at conferences over the past four years has confirmed that belief.

A year later in April 2007, IBM along with MySQL AB announced that the popular open-source database would be supported on i. While this support was encouraging, it wasn’t nearly as exciting as the subsequent announcement of the MySQL DB2 for i storage engine. Available since mid-2009, this little gem provides access DB2 data via the MYSQL interface, thereby letting you write RPG extensions for the many open-source applications based on MySQL, among many other interesting possibilities.

A Decade of RPG

The first release with significant RPG content in the decade was V5R1 and it was huge for the most popular language on the platform. V5R1 bought free-form RPG, the wonderful new MONITOR error handling support and the beginnings of “grown-up” data structuring facilities. The DS facilities were further enhanced with V5R2. At long last, we could actually define simple 2-dimensional arrays (think monthly sales over a number of years)—something that Excel users had been able to do forever but which required unnatural acts in RPG prior to this release.

V5R3 had only a few goodies, but V5R4 came back with a bang with native RPG support for processing XML documents. The last release of the decade was 6.1 (the release nomenclature having changed from the familiar VnRm format). RPG 6.1 raised the limits on the size of fields, arrays, data structures, etc. It also added the capability to define files in subprocedures and, perhaps more importantly, pass files as parameters. Since many shops have yet to upgrade to 6.1, these features are still not as widely used as they deserve to be, but their value will be proven in the future.

RPG Web Programming

The decade saw the widespread introduction of many third-party tools for developing interactive Web applications that were oriented toward RPG developers. But many shops either couldn’t or didn’t want to purchase a product for their Web development, nor did they want to use Java. Some RPG programmers began using native system APIs directly from RPG, but found it a tedious task. An IBMer in Rochester, Mel Rothman, developed a toolset to simplify the task of developing and maintaining interactive Web applications with RPG.

Eventually IBM made the toolset, now called CGIDEV2, available as a free download. With the help of Giovanni Perotti, who developed educational and support materials, it’s become a popular tool for RPG developers. It has also spawned some terrific add-ons in the form of software such as the Renaissance Framework that add Web 2.0 capabilities and many other features to the basic package.

Sadly, IBM hasn’t lived up to its promises of continuing to enhance and support the tool and never released the package to open source. As a result, now two distinct flavors of CGIDEV2 exist—the IBM version and the enhanced version supported by the EASY400 Web site. This is a terrific tool that is underutilized in part due to its nebulous status. We hope in the new decade IBM will either release CGIDEV2 from its shackles or actually do something with it.

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