midrange.com - In My Humble Opinion

Using Eclipselink (Eclipse Persistence Services Project) with DB/2 on System i

This post is about Eclipselink and my experience using it with the System i. It also describes some problems I ran into so you can avoid them if you try Eclipselink. Eclipselink is Eclipse Persistence Services Project, version 1.0 was released July 9, 2008. See http://www.eclipse.org/eclipselink/ I won’t ...

Build a Tool

Over the past few months I've become quite a tool builder. The project I'm currently on involves a lot of really repetative code changes and analysis ... basically I've been externalizing as much of the text in the product as I can (to message files). There are a LOT of display ...

5250 for iPhone

The folks at Mochasoft have come out with a new 5250 client for mobile devices ... this one for the iPhone. There are two versions in the Apple iTunes Store ... a free 'Lite' version and the full version for $29.99. For what it does, the $29.99 cost is not unreasonable ... ...

Context Is Key

Ha! I'll bet you thought this blog was dead. Well, in the words of Miracle Max, only mostly dead. I'm in the process of reading a new programming book (well, not new to some ... new to me). I'll probably post a review in a week or so (yeah, right). Anyways, it ...

Al Barsa

This morning, on my way back from COMMON, I received email from a friend informing me that Al Barsa had passed away last night. This news hit me very hard ... Al has been a pillar of the AS/400 (yes, I use that name deliberately) community for many years and a ...

“I” is not a System “I” anymore

Well, I haven't been blogging from COMMON yet ... but I just got out of the IBM Town Hall meeting a few minutes ago. It was announced that the "System i" and "System p" were merging into a single, unified, platform called "Power". The OS, originally named OS/400, then I5/OS, is ...

Easy Field Encyption for System i

For our new billing system (AR), we wanted to store account numbers for so that our customers could auto-pay their bills. After some searching and seeing how complicated the APIs are to use, I found these SQL functions: ENCRYPT_RC2(data, password) and DECRYPT_CHAR(data, password) . These looked promising and being that ...

LUG Services

For those of you involved in System i oriented Local User Groups (LUGs), midrange.com offers some free services that you might like to take advantage of ... Mailing lists You can request two types of mailing lists ... A simple announcement list to broadcast meeting information & other important bits to your membership. ...

Technician, fix thyself

Similar to the old saying "Physician, heal thyself" ... I certianly should live by those words. Today I was chasing down a problem on one of our systems at work ... a program that works fine on V5R2 wasn't working on V5R3. I was 99% sure the problem was in an i5/os ...

The RPG Cycle. JSF would like it, but can’t have it.

I was sitting here at my desk after replacing the window motor in my van pondering this thought: "Man, I think JSF is trying to emulate the RPG cycle with it's 'Life Cycle' (click here), the exact thing that so many RPGers are trying to get away from." Or maybe it ...