By Joe Pluta

Ah, another TechTip! Quick update: My last TechTip on getting PTFs on CD worked just fine. I'll follow up shortly with a TechTip on installing those PTFs from an image catalog. And now back to your regularly scheduled tip.

Ever been jealous of your Perl programming colleagues with their built-in hash tables? Learn how to make your own using RPG!

By Adam Glauser

What is an ADT? ADT is short for abstract data type. The NIST defines ADTs as "set[s] of data values and associated operations that are precisely specified independent of any particular implementation." A good way to see what this means is through an example. The stack ADT is perhaps the most well-known and straightforward. A stack is a collection of data items that can be visualized as being arranged in a pile. All ADTs provide creation and deletion operations. Other operations defined for stacks are...

How do you access other databases from your System i and track changes to the remote data?

Database processing is at the core of most IT applications. The processing of information usually involves reading and updating records within a database. While the System i is at the heart of many database storage and transaction applications, more and more System i shops have data that is stored and accessed on other servers. Popular databases such as SQL Server, Oracle, and MySQL store important company data.

Open desktop applications from RPG when the user presses a key in a 5250 session.

by Aaron Bartell

Every so often, I see the mailing lists address the topic of how to automatically open desktop applications from RPG when the user presses a key in a 5250 session. Usually, the need is to open a browser window and deep link into a Web site by passing a long URL string (e.g., http://ups.com/trackpackage/packageid=Z123412341234). The standard answer is to use one of the features in Client Access (i.e., STRPCO or STRPCCMD). While that works in some cases, an alternative approach is to spin your own wool. That's where I come in.

Qshell's cmp (compare) command can easily tell you whether two files are exactly the same.

I have been on the System i for a number of years now, and it seems there is no end to the neat functionality I find on a regular basis to modernize and extend my existing applications.