Like a cross between The Onion and Search400, Mid-Deranged is a satirical humor site about the IBM midrange. So it’s imperative that you not take it seriously when the site proclaims that IBM has announced it is buying Nintendo and merging Power Systems with the Wii to create the IBMii.

It’s also important that you realize it’s a joke when the site announces IBM’s new environmentally friendly program for the i, called Recycle/400.

“For a minimal fee IBM will take your old AS/400 and convert it to a useful product,” the post says. And then it lists 29 ways an AS/400 can be reused. Some of my favorites: rabbit cage, tanning booth, and highway crash barrier.

Yes, you will want to check this site out. It will bring a few chuckles into your System i world. And it doesn’t hesitate to take pot shots at IBM and System i competitors. The most recent post declares that Sun is suing the island of Java for trademark infringement, while an earlier one “reports” that a guest keynote speaker at the Common conference was Bill Gates, who gave a speech entitled “Software Quality through Perception, not Reality.” Ouch.

On the one hand we hear that it is increasingly difficult to find a job working on a 20-year-old system. But we also hear that companies are looking to modernize their legacy systems and move away from RPG in favor of a programming language that the new college graduates are comfortable with. To me, there seems to be confusion out there, or at least a limited ability for job seekers and employers to connect. I have personally received emails from both head-hunters looking for AS/400 programmers and email from job hunters looking for leads on a new position.

So this week as I was browsing the feeds and blogs and I ran across Get AS400 Jobs.  A site dedicated to all of you, dear readers — I just had to share.
My initial impression is that the jobs listed are current and real — not some random marketing gimmick leading to a dead-end. From Boston, Mass. to East Wenatchee, Wa., AS/400 insiders are desired. So if you’re looking for a change of scenery or want to escape from your boss, you might want to take a look. If not, you may want to bookmark it for future reference. At the very least, it’s good fun to see what skills are desired — I don’t know about you, but there’s a certain joy in reading a job listing and being able to say “Oh, I could so do that.”

This year, as many of you know, is the 20th anniversary of the introduction of AS/400. This weekend IBM held a big celebration at its campus up in Rochester, Minn. in celebration of the anniversary. But 20 years ago, not everyone was celebrating.

When System/36 and System/38 merged to become the AS/400 back in 1988, the higher-end customers were pleased, but not all the smaller ones were. This according to Frank Soltis, the chief scientist of System i who has been working on the AS/400 platform since it still had the codename of “Silverlake.” Soltis spoke during a Webcast last week hosted by Tango/04, a System i server monitoring software company.

“System/36 folks absolutely refused to buy AS/400 for many years,” Soltis said.

Twenty years later, System i and p have merged to become Power Systems, and similar consternation exists among users. The high-end ones tend to like the merger, Soltis said, while the smaller customers are worried that they’re losing their business computing platform.

So will all the System i users become Power System converts? Perhaps not, but predictions of the platform’s demise may be premature.

It is striking to see how far the platform has come in 20 years. Ian Jarman, the System i product manager, said that the first AS/400 machine, the B10, was rated at 3 cpw (commercial processing workload). A new Power6 that runs i5/OS, the 595, is rated at 300,000 cpw.

Soltis said during the Webcast that if someone had asked him 20 years ago what he’d be doing in 20 years, he certainly would not have guessed that he’d still be working on the AS/400. So what about 20 years from now? Jarman said this:

“I’m very confident that we can take our applications forward into any generation of technology to come and we’ve made investments with Power systems. I can’t predict the future but we have positioned it to really move wherever the mainstream moves.”

Other Soltis anniversaries

Soltis is celebrating other work-related anniversaries this year with IBM. This October is the 30th anniversary of System/38, one of the precursors to the AS/400. And then in November, Soltis is celebrating 40 years of working full-time with IBM. His first assignment? To create a replacement for the System/3 minicomputer, which ended up being the System/38, which ended up being the AS/400, iSeries, System i and now Power Systems.

“Even my children point out to me that in all my 40 years at IBM, I’ve only really worked on one product,” he said.

Regrets?

Soltis revealed that when IBM decided to merge System i and p, the opportunity arose to re-rename the operating system from i5/OS back to OS400. Soltis opposed the reversion, agreeing with most at IBM that “going backward was a bad thing.” Still, all the renaming has given Soltis some regrets.

“If there was something I could do, it would be to undo all the renaming,” he said.

The future, according to Frank Soltis

Some things to look for, both from IBM, its customers, and the server market in general, according to Soltis:

• “In the future one of the things we’re looking to do is move toward special purpose processors. As a result, one of the things we have done is worked out the design of the next generation of Power technology called Power7. If you look at Power7, it’s not just Power anymore. It’s Power plus a lot of these special purpose processors.”
• “Back in 2001, we were having negotiations with Microsoft to run Windows on Power…Over the last several years, Microsoft has been busy moving to 64-bit platforms. As a result, very little has happened with running Windows on Power…We certainly don’t see anything in the near future with Windows running on Power.”
• On the System i blade: “A lot of our customers don’t have blades, and personally I don’t see a lot of them moving to a blade environment. Yes, we’re going to support blades where it makes sense, but also support the fully integrated system as we always have.”
• “Personally I believe over the next couple years there will only be two vendors of processing technology (in business computing)…I’m a firm believer that Intel and IBM will be the two main ones or only ones…”

Over a year after IBM’s new Enterprise Generation Language (EGL) was launched, and following IBM’s own iSeries EGL tutorial publication, the EGL Cafe has opened. The site launch occurred after IBM’s Rational Software Developer Conference (RSDC) last week in Orlando, Fla.

New to the blogosphere (but not to i), Joe Pluta has launched his own EGL and i blog on the site. Pluta’s June 11, 2008, entry expounds the potential of EGL to help i developers everywhere:

By combining a procedural syntax with the concept of hiding complexity, EGL does what i developers have been asking for: it gives them a clean, consistent way to write web applications where they can concentrate on the business logic rather than the plumbing. In many ways, EGL is the spiritual successor to the 5250. While it far surpasses the 5250 in rich user experience, in many ways it’s as easy, if not easier, to use than the old green screen SDA. Combine that with a carefully crafted and deceptively simple CALL Interface, and EGL does for the web what display files did for the green screen.

And it’s clear that Pluta has been on board the EGL bandwagon for some time. In April 2008 he published a lengthy article explaining the niche the new programming language fills: Developing EGL Applications for the System i. In his EGL and i blog, Pluta explained that he intends to help i users learn how to work with this new language while taking advantage of their years of business logic experience.

… i shops already have business logic — logic that they’ve spent years (even decades!) developing — and the best initial use of EGL in those shops is exposing that logic, either directly as browser-based web applications or — moving to the true SOA approach — as web services that can be consumed by other internal and external clients. Then, they can combine that newly enabled business logic with all the rich application features of EGL to create new integrated applications they never dreamed of.

And my goal will be to explain how to do that quickly and productively.

If you’re saying, “Hold on a second? What’s EGL again?” You might find the video interview with EGL language architect Tim Wilson helpful.

But, if you’ve been paying attention to this new language, let us know. Leave your comments about your feelings, insights, or opinions about EGL. If you have experience using EGL on i, consider submittng a Tip!

Kind of an old post, but I missed it and so I need to link to it here. It comes from Aaron Bartell and includes the following joke:

The boy Microsoft programmer is smoking and leaving smoke rings into the air.

The girl AS/400 programmer gets irritated with the smoke and says to her lover co-worker: “Can’t you see the warning written on the cigarettes packet, smoking is injurious to health!”

The boy replies back: “Darling, I am a Microsoft programmer. We don’t worry about warnings, we only worry about errors.”

In the go-ahead-and-smile category, the iDevelop blog came up with a bunch more acronyms beyond YiP (Young i Professionals) and now RiP (Retired i Professionals) to describe various factions of the i community. Here are a couple:

MiPs-–Modern i Professionals-–those who like to stay up with technology and the latest in capabilities of the i. These might be contrasted with the next group. …

LiPs-–Luddite i Professionals-–those who resist new capabilities and technology. “It’s been good enough for me and/or my users since 1988. …”

A couple readers posted in the comments with their suggestions. The best back-and-forth started with Aaron Bartell, who suggested FRiP, Fence Riding i Professionals, defined as “personnel in a company who can’t make a technology direction decision if their life depended on it.” Another commenter responded to that by saying “isn’t a ‘FRiP’ the same as a ‘CIO’?”

Any others? The only one I could come up with was NiPs: Name-consumed i Professionals (NCiPs, maybe?) They are the ones obsessed with whether the platform should be called AS/400, iSeries, System i, or now IBM i or Power Systems. And I grant that sometimes their obsession is warranted. I would also guess that there are plenty of DKWTCTPiISs, which stands for Don’t Know What To Call The Platform i IBM Salesperson.

There have been plenty of arguments for and against putting System i on a blade server. Proponents say that being able to have their i, p and x86 servers all in one BladeCenter chassis is a big selling point. Detractors worry that I/O performance won’t be the same on a blade, or that System i shops in general don’t really need the small-form factor of the blade.

But as Chris Maxcer points out in his talk with IBM business partner Sirius, interest in the i blade has been high so far, but sales are low. Why? Well, when you get to the end of the post, it seems that maybe it’s just because System i blades are still in their infancy. IBM announced the first i blade at the beginning of April, so we’re only a couple months in.

Because it’s early on, configurations are limited. Users can get IBM i (formerly i5/OS) on the JS12 blade, which has a single dual-core Power chip, or the JS22 blade, which has two dual-core Power chips. Even there, though, there is some confusion on IBM’s own website regarding the JS22. While one Power blade overview site mentions support for IBM i on the JS22, the more detailed server specs page says nothing about IBM i support. In the end it doesn’t matter that much — if JS22 supports IBM i, then it supports it. But there could be some confusion in the meantime from users (or nosy reporters) browsing the site.

Maxcer also quotes Sirius as saying that there essentially needs to be a trifecta for a user to want to buy i blades. One, they have to be an i user. Second, they should probably already be running blades and have a BladeCenter chassis on the ready (with empty slots, of course). And finally, Sirius said the user would also have to have DS4000 or DS8000 external storage server.

One final note on the post: At the end, we find out that Sirius is actually bullish on i blades, with the director of System i and x products at the company saying that “(i)n the future, five-to-ten years, it’s going to be widely adopted.”

Necessity is the mother of invention. And so, many System i shops will find themselves inventing new applications to perform necessary business functions. This practice is not limited to end-users, but includes vendors using the AS400 to develop applications and provide support for businesses running i. First Option Inc. is one such shop. In “spare time,” the company developed a java-based monitoring application that collects key health indicators of an AS400. Released in April 2008, the iSeries Watchdog application’s evolution and development story is shared here in a Q&A with First Option president, Paul Fuller.

Could you describe the specific circumstances of the internal problem that your company was having that led to the development of the Watchdog program?

We have service level agreements (SLAs) that require our iSeries box to be up 24 x 7 x 365, and we need to ensure that if there is a problem we address it immediately. There are financial penalties if we do not resolve problems in a specific period of time. Prior to Watchdog, the systems were checked manually. This presented two problems: 1) Operators were involved in the manual checking rather than other billable activities — resulting in reduced revenue. 2) The manual method was not scalable (i.e., more boxes mean more people). We looked at the existing packages on the market and they were too expensive. We had a very basic need and we did not want to purchase additional products in order to make the monitoring software run. We are a software development shop, so why not build it ourselves!

Why Java? Was this the immediate solution, or did it just happen to work well? Did you consider other options?

Java was the immediate solution for the front end interface. We had in-house expertise and it is platform independent. Using Java also allowed us to work with open source tools. We had not worked with Java Persistence API (JPA), Spring or LDAP on the iSeries but had been reading a lot about them in the Trades. Since we are a Java/RPG shop, we wanted to try out some new technologies and frameworks. So, this was a perfect opportunity to solve an internal need and further develop our consulting skill set.

For the back end, the programs that gather key health indicators are RPG service programs. In terms of data access, we let the iSeries do what it does best, crunch data. Additionally, the type of information we needed to gather was iSeries-specific so it did not make a lot of sense to use Java because it was already tied to the platform.

How long did it take to develop the Watchdog program?

We started in November 2007 of last year. The application was developed on nights and weekends so we did not finish it until March 2008. Had we been working on it full-time, it probably would have taken a couple of months.

What problems did you encounter along the way? (Were there work-arounds or problems that you had to deal with?)

We did have a few problems. We wanted to use a tool to generate JPA entities from SQL tables. The tool needed to run on the latest version of Eclipse so we had to abandon WebSphere development studio client (WDSC) and go with Eclipse in order to use the tool. We also used the IBM Interrogated application server released in January of 2008. There was not a lot of documentation and/or knowledge regarding this product. So, we had to engage IBM in order to resolve some of these problems. The LDAP web based interface was not available on WebSphere 6.1 so we had to find an alternate tool to create schemas and enter test data.

There are similar products available — why didn’t you invest in one of the competitor’s products instead of spending the time and energy developing your own?

There are definitely some very good products on the market that have some of the same functionality. As I mentioned above, we thought the products were too expensive and did not like the front end. The interface to the user was either green screen or a very difficult to read dashboard. Also, you had to purchase the software that had a traditional price based model — the larger the model and processing group, the more expensive the software. We would have had to purchase software maintenance in addition to the upfront cost. Some of the products also required purchasing additional third-party products in order from them to work.

What size company is Watchdog preferable for?

We are providing this software as a service (SaaS). We will establish a secured connection to the customer, install a client on their iSeries which will gather the monitoring data and configure the alert system as well as provide the Web Services to send the data to a First Option Inc. server. We charge a monthly fee that includes rental of the client software and the graphical front end. The rental fee is not based on the iSeries model or processor group and you do not have to buy software maintenance.

We think this will appeal to small- to medium-sized businesses that require a solid monitoring system for a price that makes business sense. We can also bundle a remote monitoring service that will respond and resolve problems on the iSeries. This allows small- to medium-sized businesses to focus on their core business not running a System Operations Group.

I started in the software development business writing code on a S36. The most overwhelming change over the past 20 years is the number of options available to develop and deploy software. From the creation of the development environment to the deployment of the application on a production server, there are a number of products to install and integrate. It’s easy to get lost in the technology and lose focus on the business need. It is extremely important to engage an experienced development team who understands that the requirement is always a superior software product to support your business need.