Working notes from real z/OS engagements — Endevor-to-Git migrations, DBB builds, IDz performance, code pages, and mainframe CI/CD. The same knowledge we bring to yours.
In preparation for the IBM Innovate conference starting this June, I’ve put together some helpful advice to newcomers who’ve not been to one of the conferences before. By no means is this a complete list, nor is it an official list. Its MY list. Enjoy: What to bring CLOTHING: Well, first off, this is Florida. I live … Read more
So you decide to take a stroll into the cool winds of the data center, only to find yourself surrounded by these towering, blinking, Linux machines. You realize you need to placate these hot breathing daemons, if only you had some shell script mojo. Well, here is a little guide to help you survive until … Read more
Rational Development and Test (or RD&T for short), is a virtualized instance of a z/OS mainframe operating system running on a Linux host, on a normal Intel based CPU. We’re assuming that you might already be familiarized with it with this article. When starting the RD&T box, you should be using a linux startup script … Read more
This is a view that does not get mentioned enough in the training exercises we do, so we’re mentioning it here for posterity’s sake. If you’re working with a job and trying to understand where your batch job has failed, or if you’re trying to understand an ABEND, there is a built in lookup tool … Read more
Continuous Integration I’ve recently read a couple of great books on the agile discipline of continuous integration. For those not familiar, this is the concept of using automation to build source code on a very frequent interval, and report defects or failures in the build to the team. The initial movement began after JUnit started … Read more
What is refactoring? Refactoring has long been a discipline of the agile development world. Wikipedia defines refactoring as: “A disciplined technique for restructuring an existing body of code, altering its internal structure without changing its external behavior…. [and its] advantages include improved code readability and reduced complexity to improve the maintainability of the source code, … Read more
I get this question often. Yes, you can map your control (CTRL) key on your keyboard to a specific function such as ENTER or RESET in the HCE of RDz. Open your workbench preferences (Window – Preferences). Go to General > Keys > Host Connection Control Keys. You can then map the keys to specific … Read more
Rational Team Concert (RTC) is gaining in popularity these days, and we are certainly seeing more and more of it in our business. RTC provides several benefits and features that span development silos. Traditionally, an IT shop would have a different SCM and build system for distributed systems, more for .NET, and yet something completely … Read more
They guys on the RDz product team have done an excellent job of getting new features into the product in the latest release of RDz. Already, the product had great support for viewing performance hierarchies, and showing dependencies of copy books. Version 8.5 really builds on the program analysis capabilities of the product with the new program control … Read more
The traditional tool for development of applications on the IBM i is the SEU green screen interface. Many developers still use this for editing source members, and shrug the thought of moving to a rich IDE. What they may not know is that SEU/PDM have been “stabilized”, which is an IBM euphemism that means “We ain’t doing … Read more