IBM RDi v9.5 Coming

Posted by: Bob Cozzi

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Cozzi Productions, Inc.

www.cozTools.com/qryfile

Chicagoland

IBM RDi v9.5 Coming
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Published: 02 Sep 2015
Revised: 03 Sep 2015 - 3011 days ago
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IBM RDi v9.5 Coming Published by: Bob Cozzi on 02 Sep 2015 view comments(3)

IBM is announcing an update to the RDi product. For IBM i users there is (very) little new functionality but two new features that caught my eye are:

Addition of a built-in 5250 emulator
Removal of the 80-column restriction in RPG code editor, to enable fully free-form RPG (use of fully free-form requires corresponding support in the RPG compiler, delivery of which is expected in the form of a TR during the calendar quarter in which this announcement is being published)

Both are extremely useful features; I'm speculating IBM is integrating ACS's 5250 emulator plug-in, but the interesting one is the 80-column RPG support. I haven't read or heard about IBM relaxing the 80-column restriction, if they do, that'll be a great day so long as the compiled code runs on v7r1 as well as v7r2.

[UPDATE: IBM confirms that the RDi announcement "pre-announces an upcoming RPG IV feature" but won't add anything further. My speculation is that RPG IV may FINALLY free itself from its 80-column Punch Card Legacy!]

What I do not see is support for non-Windows environments, specifically Mac OS X.

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Posted by: starbuck5250

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Comment on: IBM RDi v9.5 Coming
Posted: 8 years 2 months 30 days 13 hours 23 minutes ago

I'm not overly fond of the way IBM scatters information across multiple web sites these days. The official announcement, ENUS215-380 has a section for Software Prerequisites, and that points to the IBM RDi home page. Click the System Requirements tab, and there, click the Requirements by Component > Clients button and you finally reach the RDi requirements page which says that RDi works with several versions of Red Hat, SUSE, and Ubuntu as well as several versions of Windows.

With respect to the 80-column limitation, it looks like the IDE is being changed slightly in advance of the compiler. Soon, we'll finally be able to write RPG code free of the ancient 80 column limit.

Posted by: bobcozzi

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Chicagoland

www.cozTools.com/qryfile

Comment on: IBM RDi v9.5 Coming
Posted: 8 years 2 months 30 days 2 hours 22 minutes ago

Hi Buck, I'm still looking for the Mac version.

If Java is "so portable" what's keeping it?

Posted by: starbuck5250

Premium member *

Comment on: IBM RDi v9.5 Coming
Posted: 8 years 2 months 29 days 8 hours 10 minutes ago

I've been an RDi user for many years, more than a decade. I really, REALLY liked Code/400 which was OS/2. Everyone was running Windows, so IBM spent time and money to port it to Windows. And then the next Windows, and the next, etc. At some point IBM decided to move to Eclipse. Native Eclipse is Java-only, but there was a transition period where some of the parsers were implemented with Windows DLLs, so while the base Eclipse would run anywhere, the LPEX plugin was Windows-only.

Tim Rowe, in 2013, said that the issue is the verifiers would need to be ported. I guess that means that the verifiers (essentially offline compilers) are still DLLs or Windows or .so files for Linux. I never use Verify, so I wouldn't care if they were there or not, and that was suggested - ship the Mac version sans verifiers. Apparently Corporate didn't care for that idea.