Glad to have you back for this week's IBM i Pulse! Each week we'll take a deeper look at the latest IBM i and Profound Logic news. This week we are looking at the overlooked security upgrades for the IBM i 7.4 and the introduction of the R language to the IBM i family.
From Our Experts:
- Ted Holt's recent article for IT Jungle helps with Dealing with RPG Errors and Embedded SQL.
Profound Logic News:
- Profound Logic and IBM Systems partnered together for a webinar on Adding Professional Services for Sure-Fire Project Success.
Educational Resources:
- Scott Klement introduces you to the latest version (V6) of Profound UI's Visual Designer.
- Debugging Profound.js Applications Built with Node.js is easier than you think!
- Get a look at our Guided Lab: Part 4 on creating an Employee Data Application in NodeRun.
Product News:
- Profound UI Version 6 has a new Fix Pack 3.0 and Profound.js 4.10 that are now available!
Industry News:
How IBM i 7.4 Improves Security by Alex Woodie
Last week IBM i 7.4 was unveiled and after the dust settled it was clear that the Db2 Mirror update got most of the attention from the IBM i community. But within that 7.4 release were significant security upgrades including enhancements to the Authority Collection and support for the latest over-the-wire encryption protocol.
Alison Butterill, IBM i product offering manager at IBM, said it best, “Our big things are around those two main themes – availability as well as security, those are the two main themes. But we have lots of things across the board."
Two years ago, IBM introduced the Authority Collection when they rolled out IBM i 7.3 and it gave customers significant new user-focused security capabilities. The Authority Collection gave IBM i shops a way to determine the minimum authority that a user requires to complete an application function. After that level is decided, it was up to the administrator to implement changes manually in IBM i's security settings (or use a third party tool). With the newest version of IBM i, IBM has doubled down on the Authority Collection function by expanding its reach in a big way.
R Comes to i by Alex Woodie
The language R is now officially supported by the IBM i operating system. This announcement came last week and is a sign that IBM is continuing to pursue open source opportunities for its products. R rose to fame by becoming a favorite of data scientists, statisticians, and others that were involved with scientific computing. This addition to the IBM i language family gives an immediate boost when it comes to data mining and machine learning for IBM i.
A pair of computer science professors developed the R language over 25 years ago. Ross Ihaka and Robert Gentleman both working for the University of Auckland in New Zealand developed the R language largely in C and Fortran and based it on S (a programming language used for fast program prototyping).
R is now one of the top languages for machine learning and Artificial Intelligence (AI) and most data scientists working with R get it through an open source GNU package that includes a wide variety of pre-built programs. These programs include linear and nonlinear modeling, classical statistical tests, time-series analysis, and more.
The R language is taught in many universities and is one of the go-to languages for students studying scientific and statistical categories. The addition of the R language to the IBM i and the youthful nature of its users shows that IBM is looking to the future of the platform by making it easier for these young developers to connect to it.
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