TUG Buzz!
Nov. 10, 2010

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The Toronto Users Group  
 for Power Systems (TUG) is a user group/forum for the exchange  
 of ideas, and specializes  
 in providing affordable 
  education relating to the  
 IBM iSeries, AS/400,  
 System i, and Power Systems platforms.  

 TUG is in its 26th year of operation.

Welcome to TUG's eNewsletter: "TUG Buzz!"

IN THIS ISSUE:

1. Next MoM - December 1 at the IBM Toronto Lab
2. TUG Night School Continues at Seneca @ York

Next MoM — December 1, 2010 at the IBM Toronto Software Laboratory

LOCATION: 8200 Warden Ave East, Markham, Ontario L6G 1C7 Canada.
ADMISSION: Free to all TUG members ($40 non-members)

Register at www.tug.ca/reg_meet_form.php.

THE AGENDA

2:00 Session:
Revolutionizing Application Development and Maintenance on Power Systems

• Reduce the time and costs associated with developing and maintaining applications
• Enable a more agile, collaborative and flexible product and software development infrastructure to respond to changing market dynamics with Rational Team Concert.
• Exploit Power Systems including the latest POWER7 architecture and multi-core technology, boosting performance, productivity and portability with Rational compilers.

Speaker:

Mike Fulton is the new IBM Architect for Rational Solutions on Power. His role is to plan for future features and functions in Rational Products. Mike specializes in tooling close to the metal, in particular debuggers, profilers and compilers.

Mike has worked for IBM Canada for more than 20 years, working on the mainframe C, C++, Java static compilers, C/C++ debug engines, remote IDE's for Java targeting CICS, and hardware sampling profilers, mostly on z/OS. In 1999, Mike moved back to British Columbia, but kept working for the Toronto Lab. Over the last decade, Mike has focused on developing Java Runtime Environments for System z, as well as Real Time systems. This year, Mike moved to the Rational team to lead the Rational Developer for Power product, focusing on performance analysis tooling for everyone, not just PhD's in hardware design.

"My favourite customer engagements are when I have the luxury of collaborating to build a solution for the customer. It's even better when it's a big customer and the solution involves multiple products, you feel you are doing something truly important for the customer, and leveraging the strengths of IBM. In the late 1990's, I was working on HPCJ, which was a Java development and run-time environment targeted primarily at CICS. The customer wanted to get all the advantages of Java, but needed to leverage their existing COBOL assets, so they were developing new Java code under VA Java and running under CICS. After significant design and development across VA Java, remote tooling services from third party vendors, loader changes, binder changes, CICS runtime enhancements, and development of a specialized Java runtime environment capable of running in CICS, the IBM team was able to create a terrific solution for our customer, which we generalized into a successful solution for many other customers."

3:00 Intermission (with refreshments)

3:30 Session:
Open Access: RPG Edition

Find out what all the buzz is about!
• Open Access opens up RPG's F-spec files to be able to access anything - the Web, an IFS file, an Excel document, a data queue, anything you can think of
• Find out how Open Access accomplishes this, with the aid of "Handlers"
• What is a handler?
• How does a handler work?
• Who can create a handler?
• A demo of Open Access in action, with a simpler handler that reads from an IFS file
• Also, a brief overview of what else is new for release 7.1 for RPG.

Speaker:

Barbara Morris is the lead developer for the RPG compiler in the IBM Toronto Lab. She has been working on the RPG compilers since she started at IBM in 1989 after receiving a Computing Science degree from the University of Alberta. Her first enhancements for the RPG compiler were ENDIF and ENDDO back in V2R1. Since then, some of her major enhancements have been subprocedures, the ability to call Java from RPG, qualified data structures, XML-INTO, and huge 16MB variables.

4:30 Breakout Session:

Join our Rational Power Development Leaders in an informal discussion session. We want to learn more about the development challenges that your teams are facing today. This is an opportunity for you to provide your input directly to the team who
are planning the future Rational product for Power.

Speaker:

George Voutsinas is the development manager of Rational Developer for Power Systems and Rational Development Studio for i.

He joined IBM in 1993 and has since worked on a wide range of products, including the RPG compiler, C++ compiler, SEU, PDM, CODE/400, WDSC, RDi, WebFacing, Rational Team Concert and now the new Power Systems tools. He is also an Agile Coach and has been a strong advocate of the Agile Development methodology inside IBM.

George has presented at over 45 conferences around the world and is a regular presenter at the COMMON conference.

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TUG Night School Continues

If you were ever thinking that “skilling up” on PHP and Web development would be good for your career and business then now is the time to act!

TUG has made special arrangements for TUG members interested in attending the remaining PHP and Rational Night School classes. You can make up the first sessions on-line and attend the final 2 classes in person. The reduced cost will be $100 per class! When registering, enter the promo code abbrev.

Our Mobile and iPhone courses are also still accepting enrollments. See the detailed schedule below.

Register at http://www.tug.ca/tns/TNSReg.html.

TUG Night School Fall 2010 - remaining Schedule: Seneca@York.
(Start time 7:00pm)

Register at http://www.tug.ca/tns/TNSReg.html

Read what System i Network is saying about TUG Night School:
http://blogs.systeminetwork.com/isnblogs/industrybits/2010/10/tug_offers_night_school_classe.html

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