WMCPA November 2015 Monthly Meeting 

Our November Meeting will feature Richard Schoen, Director of Document Management Technologies for RJS Software Systems, a division of HelpSystems. With over 27 years of development, integration and document management experience on all system platforms, including IBM i, Windows, Mac and Linux, Richard has a unique perspective on making systems talk to each other that helps keep RJS products well positioned to take advantage of growth opportunities in today’s rapidly changing markets.

Session I - Quickly Create Powerful IBM I System Commands with Java and CL 

You’ve probably heard about the power of using Java on IBM i. Often Java based APIs can easily do tasks that a standard RPG or CL program can’t do without a lot of extra programming. Historically that has often that meant running a Websphere or Tomcat application server or attempting to embed Java calls into an RPG program which can quickly become complex and hard to debug because of the limitations of calling Java from RPG. What if there was an easy way to combine the power and simplicity of a CL command with the program logic of a Java program ? This session will introduce you to the concept of creating your own IBM i CL commands that integrate with Java program logic to perform processing and return appropriate response information as needed to the caller when the command completes. Your new Java based CL commands can then be embedded in and used with existing RPG and CL application programs. We will also look at how a Java program can be structured similar to a CL program to make it easy to use Java in a similar fashion as CL There are many Java APIs available such as iText for PDF, Java Mail for sending mail, XML parsing, reading and writing IFS files and using JT400 for database access, program access and more. Once you’ve created your own custom Java/CL commands you can easily embed those CL commands in your own system jobs by placing them into CL programs, RPG programs or scheduling them on a job scheduler such as IBM i WRKJOBSCDE or a 3rd party job scheduler such as HelpSystems Robot or Skybot enterprise schedulers. You will leave this session with a new appreciation for how Java and CL can be utilized in your own computing environment to create useful system commands.