I'm often asked how to determine a date that is some number of days in the future, or in the past, from another date. Doing this type of calculation yourself can be error-prone in terms of adjusting for the number of days in a month or the number of days in a leap year, getting the right calculation for a leap year, etc. Fortunately, i5/OS provides the ILE Common Execution Environment (CEE) Date and Time APIs to greatly simplify this type of calculation (they're documented in the i5/OS Information Center here). An introduction to the various CEE APIs (there are more than just date and time APIs) can be found here.
Mobile development is poised to surge forward as the hardware and software infrastructure mature and allow for collaborative application development.
By Chris Smith
The whole idea of mobile collaboration is making my head spin.
Talk about computing in a cloud! We seem to be headed toward a world similar to that inhabited by the Borg in Star Trek. The Borg, as you Trekkies recall, is a fictional race of cyborgs who are organized as an inter-connected collective with a hive mind. The society assimilates information (not to mention other cultures), and afterward all members of the Borg know everything each individual member knows.
This may not be a bad thing, and it certainly creates a force that can be harnessed for noble accomplishments. I'm not sure what it does for maintaining one's privacy, but I think the answer is self-evident.
