Welcome to our comprehensive blog series on mastering packed fields and bitwise operations in RPG Free! In this series, which will be published over the next few months, we will delve deep into the intricacies of these essential concepts, providing you with the knowledge and practical skills you need to enhance your programming proficiency. Chapter…

RPG, ILE, SQL & Open-Source Programming Our grandchildren have just started secondary school and along with the expected French, Spanish and German they have been offered Mandarin. Everyone has welcomed this as ‘moving with the times’ and adding another ‘useful string to their bow’. In this ever-shrinking world it is an advantage to be multi-lingual.…

What are Packed Fields? Packed fields are an essential data structure in RPG programming, specifically designed to efficiently store numeric values. This chapter explores the definition, purpose, structure, and advantages of packed fields, along with practical examples to illustrate their use. Definition of Packed Fields Packed fields are a compact numeric storage format based on…

Be it auditors, the recent NIS2 Directive , or just common sense, stepping away from IBM i user profiles with never expiring passwords has always been the better choice. Since IBM i has been around for quite some time, a lot of the security options have gotten a bit long in the tooth. For sure,…

In my last couple of articles, I have shown python accessing data on the IBM i, accessing both DB2 for i and SQLite. The SQLite article used an SQLite package to get the data, and for the DB2 for i example I used ODBC to retrieve data from the IBM i. In this article I’ll…

Introduction In November 2024 I was invited to the Benelux Common conference in the Netherlands to give a couple of workshops, and what a great event it was. Take a look at the photos /user-groups-photos I had the opportunity to meet up with a good friend of mine Niels Liisberg from Denmark, where we had…

Introduction Whenever I conduct a workshop or training session on developing in Python, I always make it a point to cover Python environments. The first question often asked has to be What are python environments?, and the very next is Why should I care about python environments? This topic is crucial for anyone diving into…

With the recent announcement of IBM i regarding the subscription model. There are a lot of questions if you wish to understand the complete impact of moving away from non-expiring licenses. Luckily enough IBM acted on these questions and did create an excellent IBM i Subscription Transformation FAQ document to help you deal with the…

In this article I will talk about another great open-source utility for our IBM i. A couple of years ago I wrote an article on a great open-source utility called Service Command. It can be found at this link. As part of this package, we have a command called SCOPENPORTS. I will show what a…

Security is hard to ignore these days and for good reason. So, adding TLS to all IBM i applications is a logical step to take. For sure there are the well know ports, for which it is not hard to guess by which application they are used. Well-know Ports Service Port Function HTTP 80 Web…

Introduction In my previous article, I wrote about how to access a SQLite database and output the SQL resultset in a neat table. If you need a recap, my previous article can be found at this link. In this article I will show you how to access a DB2 for i table, and like my…