Do your users get frustrated when they scroll down through tables and can't see the headers? You can fix that!

Written by Giovanni B. Perotti

Usually, when an HTML table containing many rows does not fit in the page height, a vertical scroll bar is generated on the right side of the page, allowing users to display the lower rows of the table. In scrolling down, however, the table headers are no longer visible, so users may need to scroll back up the page to check column headings. Users would by far prefer to have the column headers kept steady at the top of the screen, while the scroll bar scrolls just the table rows.

Although the name is nothing short of horrible, the latest edition of the Rational tools finally gives i developers the tools they need.

Written by Joe Pluta

Even those of us who love Rational Developer for i (RDi) have been clamoring for an alternative to the venerable Screen Design Aid (SDA). It's been especially frustrating because the feature was already there in the tool. It was even called Screen Designer! It was right in front of our eyes, but it had that dreaded "Technology Preview" tag associated with it, along with a big disclaimer that it was not to be used for production work. Well, in the new Rational release, the preview tag is gone. Not only that, we got an extra bonus: a printer file designer (called the Report Designer)! In fact, this article is all about bonuses for the green-screen developer, so jump in!

Are you creating commands to improve your productivity?

Written by Bruce Vining

This article is the first of several related to creating your own user CL commands. We will start with a simple command definition and then enhance the command with various features in order to demonstrate how to incorporate these extensions within your own commands. But first we need a command scenario.

So many tools…how do you choose the one that's best for you?

Written by Duncan Kenzie

If you are embarking on a new Web development project, the first decisions you need to make are the platform and the technology. Let's assume you are committed the IBM i platform. (You should be! It's secure, scaleable, reliable, and totally capable of hosting the most modern Web apps.) So the next choice is technology. That choice has been made easier for us in the last three years, with the advent of native PHP support on the IBM i platform.

Can Windows and IBM i live in application development harmony?

Written by David Brault

Editor's note: This article is an extract from the white paper titled "Using Microsoft .NET to Build Scalable Enterprise IBM i Applications" available free at the MC Press White Paper Center.

Over the last decade, we've watched Microsoft technology shift from running on the fringe of our IBM i enterprise to being intertwined, creating a ripple effect across what we need to integrate with, synchronize with, and monitor on a daily business. As the number of companies running both IBM i and Microsoft hardware continues to grow, so does the number of IT shops struggling to integrate these disparate platforms. In a world of synchronized data, data conflicts and unprotected access to DB2 from Windows applications can make us feel like we are losing control.

Create a Java "Hello World" program with RPG.

Written by Tom Snyder

Editor's note: This article is excerpted from the MC Press book Advanced Integrated RPG.

Welcome to Advanced Integrated RPG (AIR), where RPG and Java work together to provide RPG with all of the capabilities that Java has to offer. This article contains excerpts from my new book that will show you how to start the Java Virtual Machine (JVM) and display "Hello World" in RPG. This is a prerequisite to the upcoming article that will show you how to create PDFs from RPG!

Learn how to send program messages based on an API error code structure.

Written by Bruce Vining

In the previous article, "Inform Users of Problems by Sending Error Messages from Application Programs," the Send Program Message (QMHSNDPM) API was used to send a user error message indicating that a severe error had been encountered. In this article, the QMHSNDPM API will also be used, but now to send a system-related error message followed by a user error message.

As a review, back in "What to Do with Messages in the Application Program," we saw how to call a system API with the sending of error messages disabled. The scenario used was determining if an object existed by calling the Retrieve Object Description (QUSROBJD) API  and, if an error was returned in the API error code data structure, handling the error in an appropriate way. The code shown at that time was this:

Allocate and free up program storage at run time.

Written by Junlei Li

Many i5/OS APIs receive variable-length output parameters. Many i5/OS machine interface (MI) instructions expect variable-length output operands. Many algorithms implemented by user programs need to allocate program storage with unpredictable length until run time. All these facts lead to the need for allocating and freeing program storage at run time.