President's Message from Don Rima

It's late Thursday afternoon as I pull out of Pittsburgh to start the four hour return pilgrimage to a familiar pillow, hot shower and perfect smile of my 11 month old little girl. For the past two days I've been eating, drinking and sleeping neural networks so the Led going through my head is a welcome change from the norm.

As my jaunty jalopy dodges Pennsylvania's finest while warping it's way down the turnpike, I can't help but imagine what it might have been like for the early traders shipping their orders and other goods along the routes which would later become our national highway systems. In these times of knowledge increasing and people running to and fro, the technology and modality is surely changing. It wasn't that long ago that the state of the art consisted of 20-mule teams, homing pidgins, dog sleds and pony express. Now we talk of e-mail and e-commerce. Doing business "on the web" is fast becoming not only the accepted norm, but the EXPECTED norm.

So, in keeping with our attempts to provide state of the art information, our October meeting will be on E-Commerce and will be presented by Dennis Pagano of Noospherics.

A VERY special thanks to Mary McConnell for her V4R3 release briefing at the September meeting. We look forward to her returning sometime in 1999 for another release briefing....so watch your newsletters...and don't ask her when. She's sworn to secrecy.... But I'm not...at least not yet.

Our November meeting will be presented by John Carr. John will be talking about "Using RPG to access the IFS". I think you'll find this to be a very timely and useful session. The examples and handout are just super tools to work from.

In August I did the first "State of the Midrange" article for WAM. I want to thank all of you who took time to email me your comments. It is refreshing to see that I'm fairly close to the common sentiment of most members. For those that thought I didn't blast enough, it wasn't my intent to change the world, just review it... There are folks in our industry better qualified for blasting at IBM. If you don't believe me, come to COMMON some time and sit in on the "IBM Soundoff" session.

Elections

Peter, Tom, and KB would not forgive me if I failed to remind folks that our October meeting is when we elect the board for 1999. Anyone interested in running for the board should contact Peter at 703/834-3706 by the Monday before the meeting so he can add you to the ballot. We've had a good group this year and we're looking for fine results in 1999.

You should have gotten your JAM brochure. Please register early. We're expecting lots of attendees this year with folks not having the time to attend long or far away conferences to keep current...and we've only got a finite amount of resources.

October Meeting

with Dennis Pagano, Noospherics Technologies

There is a major evolutionary shift underway toward companies conducting their business on the internet. A major component of this is selling products and services directly on the internet - both business-to-consumer and business-to-business sales. Many e-commerce development tools allow the developer to show pretty pictures, but are limited in the degree of customization they allow, in the tools they offer for integration of the commerce site to the back-end systems which drive the enterprise, and in their scalability (ability to add resources to handle an ever-growing load of customers and the performance peaks they entail).

IBM has developed the Net.Commerce server product which alleviates all of these problems. It is a very powerful tool for building and operating a commerce site, provides good tools for customization, and for integrating the commerce site with back-end inventory, order entry, and order fulfillment systems. Net.Commerce runs on the AS/400, or it may run on a separate front-end processor (NT, AIX) and be linked to back-end applications running on the AS/400.

This talk will provide an overview of the features of the Net.Commerce product with an emphasis on how to integrate a commerce site with back-end systems. We will also discuss expected future features of the product and how it fits in IBM's long-term plans for e-business.

Tuesday - Oct 20, 1998 - 18:00

Tyson's Westpark
Route 7 & Westpark
Tyson's Corner, Virginia

(Parking is FREE !) Board Meeting Immediately After !

18:00 Buffet - - 19:00 Speaker - - 20:30 Adjournment

RSVP (by Friday 10/16) to Peter 703/834-3706 or 1stplace@crosslink.net $25.00/non-member

November Meeting:

More and more information of the AS/400 world is starting to be stored in stream files on the IFS. Imagine from an RPG program summarizing, say, production after some batch run and put that summarized information in a comma delimited file so that your users could bring up the information and graph it in Excel or 123!

This session will provide examples of how to write to and read from IFS stream files using RPG IV. The techniques involve RPG procedures, calling IFS APIs from within an RPG IV program. Complete program examples will be provided.

John is President of EdgeTech, a Virginia corporation, and has 17 years experience working with the IBM Midrange environments. His expertise lies in helping companies develop and implement programming standards and methodologies. He has worked on and developed most major business applications including: Accounts Payable, Accounts Receivable, General Ledger, Sales Analysis, Production Scheduling, and Order Entry, to name a few.

Through EdgeTech John has developed and markets ETIKIT (pronounced etiquette), a software package for the AS/400 that contains application program prototypes and APIs which radically increase programmer productivity and dramatically improve application consistency. ETIKIT also contains an advanced file driven menu/security system.

U P C O M I N G E V E N T S

Elections in October !

Please give some serious thought to running or nominating someone to run. This is a volunteer organization and as such we need active board members to provide the speakers and events that make the organization successful. The personal commitment required is really not very extensive, and you can tailor it to your own skills and preferences. You WILL find it a personally rewarding experience. [Competitive Pay/Regular Raises/EOE/Free Parking/etc, etc] Please give this some serious thought and give me a call if you have any questions.

Peter Maher 703/834-3706 or 1stplace@crosslink.net.

JAM '98

We know resources are especially thin this year in terms of both time and dollars. That's why we've brought all these folks and topics together for you on December 4th. So plan to give yourself and your staff an early Christmas gift by enrolling for JAM '98.

Check out the grid on our web page for more details of what's going to be presented in the various time slots.

Fax copies of the registration form to KB Soni at 301/590-0213.

For enrollment information contact KB Soni at 301/590-7121 or kbsoni@aol.com.

For technical questions on sessions call Don Rima at 703/742-3744 or dr2@access.digex.com.

Bone up on the latest AS/400 technology with on-line tutorials! IBM's AS/400 Partners in Development (PID) Web site has a dozen Internet Based Education (IBE) tutorials covering the latest additions and enhancements to AS/400 technology. For instance, the current subjects (IBM's been adding to the offerings) are DB2/400 V4 Overview, Application Development for Domino, Net.Data, E-mail, TCP/IP Overview and Configuration, Domino for AS/400 Installation/Configuration/Administration, HTTP and AS/400 Web serving, Net.commerce, Domino Mail Configuration, Domino-AS/400 Database Integration, and Server Based JAVA on AS/400.

The FREE courses tend to last 1 to 2 hours and require you to have JAVA and Javascript enabled on your browser, with RealPlayer available to handle the audio. Some courses also include video. To browse the list of courses see http://www.softmall.ibm.com/as400/education/courses.html.

Respectfully submitted for your approval by:

Tom Jones: Newsletter Editor (still searching for articles)
Peter Maher: Web-Master (still haven’t found what I’m looking for)