You may have heard of callbacks or even seen some abstract examples, but this article shows you how to use them to be more productive.

By Joe Pluta

The concept of a callback procedure is unusual for us RPG programmers, to say the least--especially for those of us who have come from the monolithic programming architectures of the early midranges and embraced the hipper, cooler concept of called programs and the brave new world of procedures. While it's easy to get my head around a procedure by thinking of it as a subroutine with parameters (thus seeing the immediate benefit of that concept), the notion of a callback is a bit more complex, mainly because the benefit of the approach is not immediately obvious. This article offers a practical example of how to use callbacks to make development much easier.

What do you do when you need to convert back and forth between EBCDIC and ASCII?

By Tom Snyder

When dealing with systems other than the IBM i or communicating with languages other than RPG, you will need to use a common language to communicate. The native language of RPG is EBCDIC, and most non-IBM systems and languages work with the ASCII code set, so you will need to convert the characters going out of and coming into RPG. This is where the Coded Character Set Identifier (CCSID) value comes into play when you see it specified as a parameter of an API.