With IBM Navigator for i, application administration has never been easier.

Written by Steve Pitcher

What's Application Administration? Simply put, Application Administration is a utility that allows you to control functions and applications available to users and groups on IBM i.

There's an IBM i command that's similar to Application Administration in that it allows you to manage many different system components—from specifying which users can get/put via an FTP client to controlling who can manage disk pools via the IBM Navigator for i Web interface or the System i Navigator thick client. In the spirit of modernization, I'm not going to show you how to use that command or even tell you the command name.

Expand your skills from the perspective of an RPG developer: Keep your IBM database close; keep your Microsoft database closer with Microsoft SQL Server.

Written by Tom Snyder

As a writer for MC Press, I understand how the sentiments on Microsoft can be, and I just happen to be watching The Godfather while putting this article together, so I thought that keeping your friends close and your enemies closer would be a good opener for my new series on Microsoft products.

Wouldn't it be nice to have just one delete command for all object types?

Written by Junlei Li

As an IBM i developer, you have numerous object-related commands that accept a qualified object name and a valid object type to identify the target object(s) to work with—for example, WRKOBJ OBJ(XLIB/XFILE) OBJTYPE(*FILE), ALCOBJ OBJ(XLIB/XPGM) OBJTYPE(*PGM), DSPOBJD OBJ(XLIB/XSPC) OBJTYPE(*USRSPC), etc. However, you do not have a Delete Object (DLTOBJ) command. Instead, you have a bunch of object type?specific delete object commands, such as Delete Program (DLTPGM), Delete File (DLTF), and so on.

Learn about basic PHP arrays and how they're defined and looped.

Written by Jan Jorgensen

If, like me, you have begun to use PHP in conjunction with RPG, you'll very soon be using the arrays in PHP. You are of course familiar with arrays in RPG, and arrays in PHP work almost the same except that there are more than 75 functions that can be used on arrays in PHP. When you start to dig into them, you'll wish that the compiler guys at IBM would start looking into them as well.

One trick in date/time arithmetic is learning to create and use durations.

Written by Joe Pluta

In the bad old days of RPG, dates and times were stored as pure numbers, and we had to work pretty hard to do any arithmetic. Time values were tough: when incrementing times, we had to roll the seconds into minutes and minutes into hours when either one hit 60, and then roll the hour at 24. Figuring out the number of seconds between two times was fun as well.

Here are a few steps that will make your job easier.

Written by Regev Yativ

Annoying scenario #1: Your salespeople are forced to do double-entry bookkeeping. Shouldn't you leave that to your accountants? Because your Salesforce.com isn't integrated into your SAP or Oracle systems, your top sales people are also data entry clerks, duplicating information among systems instead of closing more deals.

Security reporting should be an integral part of every organization's security strategy.

Written by Robin Tatam

I recently spoke with a number of attendees at COMMON's fall conference in Columbus who were facing regulatory mandates including PCI, Sarbanes-Oxley, and HIPAA. For these organizations, tremendous resources are often consumed in order to generate the variety of information deemed necessary to prove compliance. Other session attendees indicated that, despite having no formal regulatory requirement, they wanted to learn more about security reporting on IBM i.  

Did you really think that you didn't have to worry about this if you're a Java developer?

Written by Nastel Technologies

Java   provides developers with false assurance that memory leakage is something   they need not be concerned with. Even with Java Garbage Collection, leaks may occur. And further complicating the issue, OS memory usage may be stable while the JVMs fluctuate.

The   challenge is in detecting that there are leaks and then determining where they are located. There are so many places where memory could be leaking that it is non-trivial to manually check them all.