On April 15, 2010, <a href="http://www.profoundlogic.com/">Profound Logic</a> announced the release of Profound UI, its high-performance graphical user interface platform for IBM i. Today at COMMON, less than three weeks after that announcement, Profound Logic announced enhancements to Profound UI.

The most exciting news is the inclusion of an RPG Preprocessor. IBM’s recent announcement of RPG Open Access, which opens RPG up to a wide range of user interface devices, caused a lot of excitement, but it requires IBM i 6.1 or higher. Profound Logic recently conducted a webinar that drew an audience of more than 400. If a survey conducted at that time is representative of the full IBM i community, that means that about 75 percent of IBM i shops can’t use RPG Open Access.

The RPG Preprocessor that Profound Logic announced at COMMON gives shops running V5R3 or V5R4 access to RPG Open Access functionality by automatically inserting direct calls to Profound UI. This will make it easy for customers to start adopting Rational Open Access for RPG, even before they migrate to IBM i 6.1 or higher.

Profound Logic offers its preprocessor only on IBM i releases that do not support Open Access or to try out Open Access functionality. The annual fee for the preprocessor is similar to the price of IBM’s RPG Open Access. Profound Logic will provide a credit to customers that later upgrade to 6.1 or higher and obtain Open Access.

Profound Logic recently launched a <a href="http://www.profoundui.com/">micro site</a> that provides resources for Profound UI. The micro site is still being populated, but you can already find considerable information there. Registration is required to use some of the features of the micro site. <b>-- Joel Klebanoff </b>