December 5

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iSeries RPG Editor for your laptop (free AS400 SEU RDi Alternative)

By NickLitten

December 5, 2008

RDi, FREE, ide, ORION, WDSC

AS400 is Legend

JULY 2019 UPDATE — This is an old Blog. I can’t believe I wrote this over ten years ago. But, I look in the mirror and see this gray racing silver bonce and I realize that it really might have been this long ago. In recent years, RDi has become the RPG CODE EDITOR of choice. Used by discerning IBM i Software Developers worldwide. But, saying that, nowadays we have a few alternatives to RDi – If you are looking for a FREE RPG EDITOR then THIS might help 🙂

Earlier this year, I stumbled across an open source RPG Source Editor that’s built around a PC Editor called Eclipse – I’ve only ever used Eclipse for my very infrequent Java work. Having recently decided to make a concerted effort to abandon old column based RPG and set myself /FREE.

I discovered RPG NEXT GEN and I’m very excited about this great bit of software. This is what the author says about RPGNG:

This site offers some resources for working with the programming language RPG (native on IBM System i). IMHO IBM has done a poor job so far providing the RPG programming community with any decent software development kit for RPG compared to the Java Development Kit offered by Sun to the java community. Some people might now argue that IBM has done a great job by providing WDSCi and EGL. But perhaps this is comparing apples with pears. Anyway … where is the solution? One thing is clear … there is no current adhoc solution to it. I’m trying to make life a little bit easier for the RPG developers and offer some resources.

It’s still in Alpha stages of development but I think this could become a serious rival to the excellent (but expensive) IBM offering – WDSC. installation was straight forward — download it, unzip it, click it! 😉 and it worked straight out of the box.

Reading some forum discussions it seems that it could offer SEP Debugging, and basically anything else if we help the developer. This is a very exciting development and I’ve already offered my assistance to the website owner. Watch this space!

I’ve used it to tentatively edit some legacy RPG3 source code and it’s a huge improvement over clunky old SEU.

OCT 2016 UPDATE — RPG NEXT GEN is Dead — Boooooh! but MiWorkPlace has replaced it — Huzzah!  MiWorkplace is a paid commercial product, actively maintained and a direct competitor to the very expensive (but excellent) code editor from IBM – IBM RDi Rational Developer for i. But dont fret – there is a new free (yes $FREE) RPG Editor out there called ORION. It’s totally free, opensource, web based and published by IBM.  It even stores your source code in the IFS.

Free rpg editor
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