Deep Thoughts with Richard Schoen

Check out Bob Cozzi’s iSeries TV site for a Podcast done at the 19th Annual Omni Technical Conference in Chicago. This month, Bob Cozzi previews the WDSC 7 announcement. Then he visits the 19th Annual OMNI User Tech Conference–the oldest and largest Chicagoland User Group. Includes interviews with Joe Pluta from Pluta Brothers, David Gibbs from Midrange.com, Help Systems and Derek Nordaune of RJS Software Systems.  There’s also some footage from Randall Munson’s RJS sponsored presentation entitled: Discover the Magic of System i.

I found myself needing to use some Javascript this week and learned that my Javascripting skills were a little rusty.  During my travels on the web I found the following site that had some nice techniques.  Bookmark Javascripter.net as a Javascripting resource.�

I just spent my first day using the new Websphere Development Studio Client V7.0. The product was released this week and we promptly downloaded and installed it for testing. My biggest beef against using WDSC previously was the startup time of the development environment.  I would start the environment and walk away for 20 minutes while it started up.  The new environment is based on Eclipse 3.2 so the startup time has been dramatically improved. If you’re an iSeries RPG or Java developer you simply have to make the move to this new version as soon as possible.  I just may have to give up SEU in the near future.  Well…….maybe

Happy New Year.  Welcome to 2007.

RJS will be adding a .Net for iSeries Developers class to our education offerings for 2007. Recognizing the growing need for iSeries developers to know languages other than RPG, we have put together a one day class offering we will be doing at a couple of user group venues including the Omni User Conference (Feb 26th – 27th) and COMMON (April 29th – May 2nd) in Anaheim California. This will be a VB.Net and ASP.Net jumpstart class for iSeries developers.

We will follow this one day user group offering with a 3-day commercial seminar entitled “.Net for iSeries”.  Our goal will be to focus on real world things you can accomplish quickly with .Net as an iSeries developer. The class will be an intense 3-day learning experience after which RPG developers can go back to the office and begin using what thay have learned right away. Our .Net for iSeries classes will help you to continue building value into your iSeries investment.

To enhance the classroom offerings, we have begun offering commercial consulting and training services to help our customers jump start their .Net, RPG and/or Java development projects. We will also be offering classes in other Microsoft and IBM technologies such as Lotus Domino. Feel free to contact us if you have an iSeries, .Net or Java project in mind or if you would like to discuss a custom class for your development team.

I participated in a webcast with Mainsoft last week. The RJS team used the Mainsoft Visual Mainwin for J2EE Portal Edition product to create a Websphere Portlet for our WebDocs iSeries edition software. The main benefit of using Mainsoft’s product is allowing developers to use ASP.Net and VB.Net code and run the compiled applications on Websphere Portal Server, Websphere Application Server or Apache Tomcat. No Java required. Check this out and let me know what you think. Here’s the web cast link: http://cp.jupiterweb.com/index.php/3236_registration

I recently discovered a very interesting open source tool called IKVM. I was out on the web looking for ways to utilize existing Java JAR files from within a .Net application. Most specifically I wanted to use the iSeries JTOpen Toolbox for Java to access an AS/400 – iSeries back end system from .Net and didn’t want to have to rely on the iSeries ODBC or .Net providers. I downloaded IKVM and then ran the jt400.jar file through the IKVM ikvmc Java bytecode to .NET IL translator and suddenly I had a usable version of the JTOpen library in DLL format for use with .Net. So far from my testing it seems to work quite well and we plan to be using this technique in several of our commercial .Net based product offerings. Have fun with IKVM and share your stories with me.

For those of you interested in developing and scaling your Visual Studio VB.Net and C# applications to run Cross Platform, you may want to check out the open source Mono product. The following paragraph is a description of Mono from the Mono Project web site:

Mono provides the necessary software to develop and run .NET client and server applications on Linux, Solaris, Mac OS X, Windows, and Unix. Sponsored by Novell (http://www.novell.com), the Mono open source project has an active and enthusiastic contributing community and is positioned to become the leading choice for development of Linux applications.

Mono also includes its own web server that runs .Net code and web services. The web server is called: XSP. Apparently there is also an Apache Web Server Add-in called mod-mono-server which allows .Net applications to run under the standard Apache Web Server.

Check it out and have fun developing cross platform code.

Pete Helgren has a few interesting iSeries open source links and also some nice presentations on SOA and Open Source Tools and Applications for the iSeries on his open source web site: Opensource4iSeries Check out these links and presentations and thank Pete for gratiously sharing them with all of us if you visit his site.

OK, we’ve been doing cross platform Java development for just over a year now. I can still recall the moment I finally gave in to the dark side. Although in my case Darth Vader isn’t my father.

Along the way we’ve discovered a new tool called Grasshopper from a company called MainSoft. Yes I know it sounds wierd, but this tool is an add-in for Microsoft Visual Studio that utilizes the open source .Net Common Language Runtime project called MONO.

So what ? What does this tool really do for me as a Microsoft or Sun Java software developer ? Basically this tool lets our developers ride the fence in between the Microsoft, IBM and Sun worlds and allows us to maximize on our skills as Microsoft, IBM and Sun developers.

Let me explain. Our company background is AS/400 and iSeries so naturally we have applications that still run on the iSeries to support. We also have several VB programs along with developers who know VB well. Thirdly we have developers who are developing cross platform code in Java for the portability.

Using a tool like Grasshopper allows us to utilize our existing VB and C# skills to generate web applications using the Microsoft .Net languages and philosophies, yet the compiled executables can run on iSeries, Windows, Unix or Linux by simply installing and using the Apache Tomcat Web Application server.

This approach is limited to web applications and web services, but a lot of what we’re doing today involves web applications and web services. Imagine an aspx web application running natively on the iSeries under Tomcat. Believe me it works and it’s cool stuff.

Tell me your experiences after trying the Grasshopper product. Have fun and go develop cross platform.

For those of you who have done any development using Java and Websphere Development Studio or any of the derivitives of Eclipse, you have probably noticed that the environment takes a long time to load. In my never ending quest to find good tools I came across a product called X-Develop. If you’re looking for a good lightweight Java IDE environment that also lets you do .Net development, check this out. It might be just what the doctor ordered. From my testing it seems very lightweight and fast.