Build the application once, have it work on a mix of different platforms and output devices.

Written by Magic Software Enterprises Ltd.

UniPaaS is an application platform that can enable enterprises, ISVs, and system integrators to successfully build and deploy business applications. uniPaaS is the next generation of the company's award-winning eDeveloper series and gives organizations the choice to run and maintain applications in multiple deployment modes, including full client, Rich Internet Applications (RIAs), Software as a Service (SaaS), and mobile. It supports IBM i, Linux, Windows, AIX, and other UNIX servers.

With components running on both the server and PC, the snappy editor automatically formats reports, retrieves deleted records, and allows for viewing user-defined file relations that otherwise would be hidden in obscurity.

Written by Chris Smith

Everyone likes utilities—at least everyone likes to try utilities; sometimes they even stick around and become good friends. Then, over time, something changes and you part ways. Often, it's hard to say goodbye to your old buddy, even though your new acquaintance may offer the thrill of new powers and freedoms. The features that your new companion lacks, however—which may have been present in your old partner—can be cause for some regret.

Be careful when using SETLL *LOVAL on keyed access paths containing numeric key fields.

Written by Junlei Li

Almost every RPG programmer has become accustomed to setting the file pointer to the starting position of a logical file by specifying the SETLL (Set Lower Limit) RPG operation code with figurative constant *LOVAL as the search argument operand, or similarly, setting the file pointer to the end of a logical file by specifying SETGT (Set Greater Than) with *HIVAL. The SETLL *LOVAL technique worked perfectly for decades, doing exactly what we RPG programmers expected. But is it always to be trusted everywhere?

The QSPRILSP API can simplify your access to a job's most recent spool file.

Written by Bruce Vining

Last month, in "Just How Many Spool Files Do You Have?," we looked at the Retrieve Spool Information API QSPSPLI. I received quite a bit of feedback on the article—some suggesting a follow-on topic, others reporting a problem they were running into.

This TechTip series explores the useful yet simple Web services of GeoNames. We started with the time zone API, and now we'll combine two other Web services in order to retrieve data about a country, using an address or set of GPS coordinates as a starting point.

Written by Rafael Victória-Pereira

Now that we know how to find a time zone (given an address or set of GPS coordinates), let's find out more about the country! For that, I'll use the Country Info REST Web Service. As with the previous tip of this series, I won't discuss the methodology—only the highlights of the Web services used here—so if you haven't read the first tip, it might be a good idea to do it now.

With minimal Java skills, you too can build an application to access IBM i resources from a wireless device.

Written by Chris Smith

With all of the iPhone, Android, and BlackBerry applications available today, and many of the major banks and retailers building their own mobile applications for customers, it's only a matter of time before developers are faced with questions about mobile access to IBM i servers.

RPG is a fantastic language for business calculations, but sometimes it needs a little help with the more esoteric computations, and that's where APIs come in.

Written by Joe Pluta

I recently had an opportunity to program some electrical formulas (or do you say formulae?). This took me out of my normal comfort zone of traditional business mathematics and made me hearken back to my days of algebra and trigonometry. While I couldn't have done this in RPG III, it is possible in RPG IV—even using the traditional fixed-format technique. And if you're willing to stretch a bit and use ILE concepts, it's actually quite easy to do arbitrarily complex mathematical calculations in RPG IV and especially in free-format RPG. All you need is a good set of mathematical APIs, and as it turns out, the IBM i provides you with not one, but two distinct sets of APIs that can be used for the purpose: the CEE APIs and the C Runtime APIs. This article will cover the CEE APIs, and I'll follow up with the C Runtime APIs in a second article.

Simon Coulter leaves us a gift before he departs.

Written by Junlei Li

As you probably know, Simon Coulter, a knowledgeable and versatile IBM i expert, passed away in October 2010. Simon was loved by many IBM i developers because he was one of the giants in the industry, on whose shoulders others could stand and reach for new heights.

Among all his posts in the news lists at midrange.com, there was one in which Simon introduced a technique that is critical to analyzing MI instruction streams of OPM programs: Re: QPROCT and QPRODT.