New life for your AS/400

A System of the present for the future:

The AS/400 has always been the hyper-stable platform companies trust for their inventory and accounting needs. It has an infinite number of processes and data that the company can use to speed up business processes.

For example, we can instantly register customers or products, in real time, via a web or mobile interface without having to maintain two synchronised database systems. Or we can consult stock at a moment's notice because we can access what is happening in our warehouses in real time.

"REST Web Services in IBM i? Of course! Why not?"

But not if the IBM Power i platform is an IBM proprietary system isolated from the outside world! Nothing could be further from the truth. For many years, IBM Power i has had open source or free tools integrated into the Operating System that allow users to interact with the rest of the platforms simply, quickly and effectively.

We will take a look at each of the options in the following articles in order to interact with our dear AS/400 and capitalise on it:

Open Source: IBM i is open to a wide range of open source products. The benefit in licensing costs with the robustness of the platform make for a winning combination. These are some of the software packages (RPM) available using yum: Node.js version 8 and version 10, Python 3,6, the "les" utility, git, the updatedb and locate utilities (in the "findutils" package), GCC 6,3,0 and many development tools, GNU versions of many common utilities such as ls, grep, sed, awk, GNU Nano and many more.

Web Applications: Not only does it have the IBM HTTP Server—the version with Apache engine improved by IBM—but we can also install and use the Nginx server as the HTTP server, which has the advantage of leaving a very small footprint while obtaining high performance at very high loads. If we like php, we can use the Zend Technologies php server. It has been available for 15 years and already has an Open Source Community version, which we can install on our IBM i for free. Furthermore, if our idea is to take advantage of RPG/COBOL operating programs, we can use tools such as IBM Host Access Transformation Services (HATS) that allow us to deploy our traditional applications in a web environment quickly and with minimal effort.

"Incredible: free software on an IBM host system. Open Source for all"

Web Services: This is how systems share functions on an HTTP support. We can ensure that our IBM i provides basic functions for reuse by other applications based on JavaScript or .NET frameworks, for example. The creation of Web Services using ILE programs is done through an assistant, which, in a few minutes, allows us to display the program in question as a REST or SOAP API. No need to learn Java, JavaScript or Node.js.

Database: It has long since ceased to be the strange database based on logical and physical files. Db2 for IBM i is a relational and modern SQL database that provides maximum performance and functionality with minimum administrative tasks. It is part of the IBM Db2 general family and is being updated at the same pace as the rest of the family. Its performance is increased with each new re-release and technology release. One of the latest features that helps us to comply with GDPR and which is shared with the rest of the IBM Db2 family is Row and Column Access Control (RCAC). It allows us to hide rows based on the user profile. This way we can have a single sales table that can be consulted by all salespeople; however they will only be able to see the records corresponding to their assigned area.

And this is just a small sample of the things that can be done with an IBM i. There is a lot of life beyond the green screen.

In this first article, we have limited ourselves to introducing the topics that we will discuss later. We want to explain how many companies, with the collaboration of Saytel, are using IBM Power i in a different and innovative way. We will also see some basic examples so that you can better understand the concepts and, who knows, sow the seeds of your next projects.

Very soon, more and better!