Are you aware of the free (and nearly free) tools that are available to enhance modern RPG application development?

By Jon Paris

Over the last few months, I have spoken at a number of conferences across North America and have just completed System i Developer's first European RPG and DB2 Summit event, which ran in partnership with COMMON Europe. One common thread that emerged from discussions with attendees at these events was a lack of awareness of many of the "modern" things that can be achieved by today's RPG applications. As a result, I decided that in this column I would briefly cover some of the tools, etc. that have piqued my interest in recent years. Since I don't want to turn this into some kind of glorified commercial, I have decided, for the most part, to stick with those options that are free of charge. As you might expect, the vast majority are Web-related, and even a cursory review will demonstrate to you the types of advanced applications that are being developed by the "i" community these days.

The library list is powerful, but it presents some difficulties in the new world of SOA; this article shows you how to get around those issues.

By Joe Pluta

Whenever we open files or call programs in i5/OS (or simply "i" as it is known as of the 6.1 release), we rely on a concept called the library list. With this unique feature of the system, each job is associated with a list of libraries, and these libraries are searched in order when you look for an object, provided that object's name wasn't qualified with a library in the first place.