This video has been making the rounds a bit, but I still thought it would entertain readers here if you haven’t seen it. Aaron Bartell is a pretty well-known RPG programmer in the System i world. It looks like Bartell had a little too much coffee in his system and was staying up too late.

By the way, he’s rocking out to “Say This Sooner” by a band called “The Almost.” Some sample lyrics: “No one will ever see these things the way I do / No one will try / All my friends say that I’m gone / But I swear / I swear I’m not.” Those are lyrics that can probably explain a lot of System i programmers’ frustrations with higher-ups who want to phase out the platform. Enjoy.

Zend now has software in beta called the Platform 5250 Bridge that basically allows you to use this interface:

to access data from these 5250 data screens:

In other words, Zend wants you to be able to use PHP to access those green screens. How it works: The Platform 5250 Bridge sets up contact between a PHP script and a green screen application. The bridge then converts green screen data into an XML format that can be entered into the PHP program or put into an HTML format that users can work with.

The beta program is available now. When it goes general availability later this year, it won’t be free, but users will be able to try out a one-user license for free. From iDevelop:

We’re really looking forward to having the chance to play with this capability, but the demonstrations we’ve seen so far have been impressive. While refacing green-screen applications is not necessarily a good long-term solution, it’s certainly a step along the road, and sometimes may be all you need. With the many additional capabilities that the PHP environment offers, this tool can do much for very little in the way of cash outlay.

That is the question many System i users out there are asking. As you can see from some comments last year, some were looking forward to i5 blades, and some were not.

A familiar misgiving is that many of the smaller System i shops aren’t that worried about the space constraints that a smaller form factor like blades can help solve. They’re usually running one box in production and maybe a second for DR, and that’s it. Buying the expensive BladeCenter chassis might not make sense for them.

Those that might take to it are the more heterogenous shops that are running System i along with a lot of x86 servers in their data center. Being able to combine all that processing power into one blade chassis could save them space and possibly help the System i server(s) communicate with the x86 ones, especially if they’re System x.

When the i5/OS blade becomes available next month, look for IBM to recommend configurations to business partners that involve an overall blade server strategy that includes System i and rids users of older System i standalone hardware.

But there is another issue: Is the JS22 blade that i5/OS will run on too big for some customers? The answer may be yes, and software costs might end up being a deterrent. The JS22 is a two-socket blade that has four Power6 processing cores. That’s more horsepower than some System i applications may need, and thus some users might get stuck paying for a software licensing tier that’s over and above what they want.

In addition to that, the i5/OS blade is about 20% more expensive than either the equivalent AIX or Linux blade ($7,436 compared to $6,129) .

David Vasta, over at our sister blog at IT Knowledge Exchange, has a post there about how he overheard an ad on the radio for the System i Express server. Considering how one of the beefs from System i users is that IBM doesn’t market the platform enough, this is decent news.

Vasta said IBM should have thrown in the starting price — $8,000 — in the ad as well, to get Microsoft and Dell to “shake in their boots.” He also takes the opportunity to bash Windows Server, saying it’s basically just a big desktop computer.

Needless to say, it’s good to see that IBM is still actively selling the System i, seeing as it’s been pushing quite hard on all its other platforms (especially System p) in recent months.

Lee Kroon, a well-known columnist and consultant on System i enterprise resource planning (ERP) applications and especially J.D. Edwards, posted a blog earlier this week on The J.D. Edwards Advisor about how i5/OS V6R1 can benefit JDE customers.

The new operating system, which IBM officially unveiled last week, will be available in March. Kroon summarizes four major reasons why V6R1 is good for JDE users: better Java performance, virtual i5/OS partitions, support for blade servers, and improved storage area network (SAN) performance.

Kroon wrote that JDE EnterpriseOne customers accustomed to running the Java Application Server on a separate platform may now be able to reconsider, adding that “IBM has told us that Java performance under V6R1 will only be a few percentage points less than that of AIX running on comparable System p models.”

With virtual i5/OS partitions, Kroon said it will be much easier for JDE customers to set up virtual partitions to allow for testing and development. V6R1 allows users to create virtual partitions that borrow resources from other partitions, a feature that wasn’t previously available.

Kroon also said that support for blade servers could help reduce hardware costs for JDE users.

The iSociety group, which serves as a MySpace-like site for IBM System i users, is holding yet another “fireside chat” this week. The transcript will likely be up at the iSociety chat site.

The chat plans to cover IBM’s recent announcement of i5/OS V6R1, the new version of the System i operating system due out in March. Participants in the chat will include Craig Johnson, i5/OS product manager, and George Farr, product tools for System i tools and Rational.

Common, the System i user group that runs iSociety, made a lot of suggestions for improvement to i5/OS, so this should make for a good chat. People can also submit V6R1-related questions for the chat by emailing chat@isociety.org.