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.

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.”

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…”

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!

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.”

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.

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.”

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.

For comparison, as an editor, the market I compete in is more broad in some ways than the IT market, but the pressures on my field include the proliferation of the blogosphere and the dwindling magazine and newspaper market. Also, because I am not located in a major metropolitan area, the actual availability of jobs in my field is more limited than if I was in New York, Boston, or Los Angeles. So, a few years ago, all of these factors led me to be interested in a web site that tells you how you stack up against others in your job field, PayScale.com. I filled out the form and the site produced a nifty graphic, showing where my salary ranked compared to others with similar experience, similar education, and similar job title.

So a few days ago, PayScale.com sent an automated message to my Inbox, asking me to check in. I did, and found I was above the average for my field, in the 60th percentile even. So, if you want to know how you stack up, start with the Salary Calculator.

According to their blog post The Nine Fastest Growing Careers for 2008, IT and Healthcare are the hot markets. And “demand is especially high for IT professionals with both management and technology skills.”

Check it out and share your results (no actual salary numbers needed): What percentile do you fall in? Did that surprise you? Does information like this affect your career planning (e.g., looking for a new job that pays more, staying happy in your current position)? Are you more likely to seek more training or certification if you think it will improve your salary?

I mention this because Magic Software, a System i vendor that develops products around helping IT run in sync with business goals. Last week, the company announced that one of its signature products, iBOLT, would be offered on Salesforce.com.

Of course this leads me to wonder about whether there are a lot of System i companies out there that are Salesforce.com customers, and in particular if they use Salesforce.com for SaaS purposes.

I looked around and noticed that J.D. Edwards, one of the biggest System i ISVs, is also part of the site, and that Salesforce.com is definitely pitching the idea of being able to do SaaS of any kind of so-called “legacy” systems through them.

We asked a few of our experts what experience they may have had running SaaS products on i, and a few responded that they didn’t have experience. So generally speaking, we can safely assume that this is still pretty new. However, Jim Mason of ebt-now shared that he has worked with customers on Salesforce.com using standard ETL tools Informatica and Data Stage which essentially do the same thing that iBolt does.

When asked about any concerns about user friendliness and security when using a product like iBolt, Mason responded,

“If you are trying to do the replication real-time, experience has shown high variances in actual performance often over the Web and proprietary networks. Properly done, security shouldn’t be an issue. Like many good ETL tools, iBolt appears to minimize programming by using visual editors to create the data maps between the data source and the data target.”

He also elaborated that the advantage and attractiveness of a product such as iBolt includes the decreased technical skill requirements to operate the program compared to locally-installed programs. However, he also noted that “debugging connection or performance problems to an SaaS application can be challenging, even for the vendors.”

With the growth in popularity of cloud computing, Mason thinks that SaaS products have a growing role to play. In fact, he’s banking on it. His company is rolling out SaaS web solutions for small businesses in the coming year that will focus on online Web collaboration without programming, simple Web stores with simple data transfers for item catalog and sales data, online web meetings and collaboration tools, and online Web databases and applications that can be synchronized with local databases using export/import in batch mode.

Magic has some customer testimonials, but I’m curious if there’s anyone else out there who is using Salesforce.com, and in what capacity. And if not, why not.

Associate Editor Leah Rosin contributed much of this report.