The publisher of ServerNEWS in Spain, Albert Blanch, sent me a heads-up note--ServerNEWS is looking to fill the two center pages of its magazine with a graphic "Manifesto" to help promote IBM i, POWER, and the IBM Business Partners and ISVs who support IBM i. *Read more…

"I have been thinking along similar lines recently, that we should begin writing our RPG code that we want to expose as external stored procedures in such a way as to be easily converted into pure SQL procedures for portability purposes. But today I think IBM SPL is weaker and less versatile than Oracle PL/SQL, and I prefer SQLRPGLE to SQL SPL. If you think about it, RPG with embedded SQL is much like an SQL procedure except that it is more powerful, more versatile and, to my mind, capable of being more elegant. It's just not cross-platform, not even on the IBM Power Systems (thanks to IBM); perhaps it should be."
--Max *Read more…

Aldon has introduced Aldon Report Manager, an open source, web-based report management solution for Aldon Lifecycle Manager IBM i Edition to help users manage and track software development projects. Aldon Report Manager lets users view, track, understand, and manage software development data and generate reports to simplify audit compliance and project management.

Through the centralized Aldon Report Manager home screen, users can select and run reports from pre-packaged templates on tasks, activities, and releases, or they can create customized queries to generate reports. Users can automatically view and track application development activities through Mozilla Firefox or Microsoft Internet Explorer browsers and also drill down through the nested reports to find specific detail information. You can view the total software development process by tasks, activities, and release summary, then provide strategic reports so that you can project response and resolution times.

"Our goal with this product is to ensure our customers always have the business-critical information they need at their fingertips and in an easy-to-read, organized fashion," said Matt Scholl, Aldon's president and CEO. "We feel this product accomplishes that and more. You can discover trends, measure performance, identify issues and exceptions, and react instantly."

IBM is pleased to report that it has snagged 235 customers who moved critical business workloads to IBM servers and storage systems from Sun and HP in the third quarter. Essentially, we're talking about Unix, moving from Sun and HP's Unix flavors over to IBM's AIX. *Read more…