iModernize - The Profound Logic Software Blog

Profound Pro Tips is a blog series that is focused on reoccurring customer issues that our support team receives and aims to answer questions our Profound Logic customers might have before they even have them! Many of our customers have similar questions and concerns which lead us to create Profound Pro Tips... an easy to reference set of reoccurring questions you might have. Don't see your question/concern in Profound Pro Tips? Please feel free to submit a support ticket and our amazing support team will be happy to help any way they can. 

This week we are discussing a quick and easy way to create custom themes for a custom CSS panel/button...

As children, we learn a lot of basic skills; reading, writing and arithmetic are the first that comes to mind. Counting is one of the essential building blocks of education and is encouraged at the earliest of ages. As we get older we continue to use these skills, but in a more sophisticated way. John Rockwell is taking the basic skill of counting and making it useful for thousands of IBM i business' and hundreds of thousands of their employees. 

Rockwell has worked in the IBM mid-range area for more than 31 years and although he considers himself semi-retired, he still feels he has a huge mission to accomplish. He is attempting to create a list of every verifiable company in the world who is running mission critical applications on the IBM i system and has them listed on his website  www.all400s.com. The goal for Rockwell is to be a massive information sharing network that gives verifiable proof of the amount of companies using (or not using) the IBM i system.

 If you know Profound Logic, then I am sure you have heard about Profound.js 2.0. We released the newest version of Profound.js on May 5th during the 2017 Spring Common Conference and Expo. Over the last few weeks we have been discussing the different aspects of Profound.js 2.0 as well as how to get started with using it. But you may be asking, "But why should MY company be using Profound.js?"  Well here are 5 reasons why you should modernize your legacy IBM i with Profound.js 2.0.

Over the past couple of weeks we have been taking an in depth look into Profound Logic's newest product... Profound.js 2.0. We discussed the benefits, the different components and now we are going to discuss the easiest ways for you to access Profound.js 2.0 for your needs. Profound.js 2.0 enables you to easily adopt Node.js in your business, and to take advantage of the many benefits of Node, including access to a much larger pool of developers for IBM i and access to countless reusable open source code packages on NPM (Node Package Manager). 

Last week we finished discussing the components of Profound.js 2.0 , this week we are discussing how to get started with using Profound.js:

Over the next several weeks we will be taking an in depth look into Profound Logic's newest product... Profound.js 2.0. We will be discussing the benefits, the different components as well as the easiest ways for you to access Profound.js 2.0 for your needs. Profound.js 2.0 enables you to easily adopt Node.js in your business, and to take advantage of the many benefits of Node, including access to a much larger pool of developers for IBM i and access to countless reusable open source code packages on NPM (Node Package Manager). 

Last week we continued to discuss the components of Profound.js 2.0 by beginning to discuss the Converter Module of Profound.js 2.0. This week we are going to finish our discussion on the Converter Module and its benefits:

Over the next several weeks we will be taking an in depth look into Profound Logic's newest product... Profound.js 2.0. We will be discussing the benefits, the different components as well as the easiest ways for you to access Profound.js 2.0 for your needs. Profound.js 2.0 enables you to easily adopt Node.js in your business, and to take advantage of the many benefits of Node, including access to a much larger pool of developers for IBM i and access to countless reusable open source code packages on NPM (Node Package Manager). 

Last week we began to discuss the components of Profound.js 2.0 by discussing the Framework and the Connector module. This week we are going to begin to discuss the largest module of Profound.js 2.0, the Converter module:

Over the next several weeks we will be taking an in depth look into Profound Logic's newest product... Profound.js 2.0. We will be discussing the benefits, the different components as well as the easiest ways for you to access Profound.js 2.0 for your needs. Profound.js 2.0 enables you to easily adopt Node.js in your business, and to take advantage of the many benefits of Node, including access to a much larger pool of developers for IBM i and access to countless reusable open source code packages on NPM (Node Package Manager). 

Lets take a deeper dive into the components of Profound.js 2.0 and how it can help modernize your legacy IBM i. There are three major components to Profound.js 2.0; the Framework, the Connector, and the Converter:

When faced with modernizing a decades-old IBM i (AS/400) application that has been maintained by several different RPG developers, it's easy to see how an IBM i development team might feel overwhelmed about where to begin. Not only could such a large-scale application modernization project be expensive, but it could potentially take a very long time and be very disruptive to the business.

The last few years have seen many advancements in tools and approaches for modernizing green screens and developing new, modern web UIs. But does that mean that the majority of businesses using IBM i have actually transformed their green screens? If not, what impact have legacy applications and development processes had on today's businesses?

We recently conducted a survey to uncover the “State of IBM i Modernization”. Over 400 companies replied to the survey, and the results were eye-opening. Here are some highlights:

• Technical users (developers, analysts) have a mostly positive view of the platform, but maintaining outdated interfaces and code is a major productivity roadblock.
  
  
• Although most companies surveyed reported that the majority of their business applications run on IBM i, their management (VP and C-level) believes that the platform is “old” and “outdated” because of the use of green screens.
  
  
• Both technical and business users are very concerned that they will lose developers in the coming years, and that training new employees on green screens will be a challenge.

Hearing someone proclaim "The IBM i platform is on its last leg!" is something I had to get used to when I first started working at Profound Logic. I had experience working with Microsoft and Oracle, and knew those platforms weren't going away anytime soon. But IBM i?

After a year with the company and several of these "sky is falling" claims from so-called experts, however, it quickly became clear to me that the prognostication about the demise of the IBM i wasn't accurate at all.

Here's the short of it: The AS/400 is several decades old, as is the RPG programming language. Therefore, according to these experts, the platform can't possibly be modern enough to support the needs of modern businesses.

And in that context, they're right - The AS/400 can't. But the IBM i can!