⭐️ Code for IBM i 2024 review

[worksofliam]

When I wrote the 2023 year-in-review for Code for IBM i, I thought that year was huge. 2024 took it a step further, with downloads and viewership doubling. I am excited to share all the cool things from 2024 in this post.

Community

We all work together

Of course, this year, more and more has been shared on LinkedIn and YouTube. I am a firm believer that most of our outreach has happened on LinkedIn as it seems most IBM i developers are there. Nonetheless, last year I shared our GitHub community statistics and showed excellent growth throughout the year. This year, pretty much all of the statistics, baring the contributions, have doubled.

On the bright side: more people are reading about and using using Code for IBM i. Props to all of the contributors, really! But, at the same time, more people creating issues, ideas and discussions does mean that the core team have had to spend more time replying and helping developers. Of course, this is the goal. But, for a majority of the contributors, this is a spare-time endevour.

Community members and advocates

People who create video content and blogs are contributors. Sadly we can't track those contributions as easily as we can git commits, but they are helping with our mission greatly. I don't think our numbers (shown above) would have doubled if it wasn't for these advocates.

• Nick Litten's YouTube channel: once again, late in 2024, Nick has been sharing more and more content about Code for IBM i. Thanks, Nick!
• Seiden Group for hosting a bi-weekly Code for IBM i meeting for the past year. This is a space where developers can come and ask questions about Code for IBM i and help get their problems solved.
• Christian Larsen's YouTube channel: Christian continues create videos to show off different ways to write RPGLE and continues to use Code for IBM i in his videos. Thanks Christian!

Core contributors

This year, I am actually going to mention more than just the core-contributors here. I am going to write about the contributors that have helped in not only the core, but also the RPGLE and Db2 for IBM i extensions.

• @ajshedivy for driving the AI support in the Db2 for IBM i extension. Adam worked on adding Continue.dev integration into the database extension this year and it's been great seeing the impression it's leaving on users' during presentations. Adam has also been a driver Mapepire, and the swap from the legacy database driver we used to use, to swapping over to Mapepire.
• @julesyan not only for contributing code to the database extension, but also for being an excellent tester. The Code for IBM i extensions have never really had a dedicated tester or UX expert before, but Julia has shown that these skills bring a nice addition to developing extensions that reach a lot of people. Julia really helped nail down some of the database issues, including security issues in executing database statements.
• @SanjulaGanepola worked on a lot of pull requests this year. He's had an eye, not only improvements to our user-experience, but also to improving our internal API. Working with Sanjula to solve architectual issues has been a blast. I have to give Sanjula major props for helping me test the large CCSID cleanup we did this year. The PR would not have pulled through without him.
• @chrjorgensen for bringing his expertise of larger systems and system management to our team. Not only is Christian an excellent core contributor, but he also is an excellent architect. He's helped combat many issues this year, including the major CCSID overhaul, and also help architect and test new ideas for the database extensions and items in our core API. Christian and I had the pleasure of hanging out in Milan this year, where we both got to speak to many people about Code for IBM i.
• @p-behr is an excellent resource for not only his IBM i knowledge, but also his VS Code and Code for IBM i knowledge. Patrick has been advocating for Code for IBM i by giving workshops and presentations this year, as well as creating video content to share with the world. Patrick has been vital in testing some major features this year and I am so very grateful that he can share his time with me.
• @forstie almost carries the flame for brand new features in the database extension. If I work on something, Scott Forstie is the tester and reviewer. There is not a feature in the database extension that is not vetted by Scott before it's been releases. What I can appreciate about Scott is that he is happy to tell me when something is bad or good. We can go back and forth for days, or weeks, until a problem is right - or I tell him it's right - until it gets release. His dedication to quality software and delivering to customers aligns with my goals. The database extension wouldn't be the same without him today.
• @sebjulliand for carrying our internal API through the finish line this year. Through the pursuit of the work he does outside of Code for IBM i, he has had the chance to really cleanup our internal API. Seb also is leading the charge of ensuring the new Debug Service is fully supported in Code for IBM i. This is a difficult challenge, but Seb takes it on the chin and is trying to make this complicated problem an easy one for our users to consume. Additionally, Seb has also solved a lot of smaller issues throughout the year. I am currently lookinng at how many PRs he's created and merged this year and it's clear that the project would be in a different state without him.
• @SJLennon is always replying to issues. We have spotted them helping users not only in our GitHub issues/discussions, but also in public forums like Midrange and Ryver. They also contribute to our public documentation often, which usually makes a page more details.

Translators

An important topic we continued to focus on this is localization. We had three new translation this year and of course, many users are happy because of their direct contribution:

• Marianne Bremnes Ottersen for Norwegian
• Nicolas Schindler for German
• Marcin Ogoń for Polish

I believe these translations came from the power of meeting people at the CEAC event in Europe.

Technical advancements

This year we have solved many technical challenges, like debugger problems, CCSID issues, improvements to the RPGLE support. I want to cover what some of these entail.

Component API

This year, we introduced the Component API. I wrote the initial draft to have a way to define optional features installed on the server. Seb extended this API to allow other extensions to add components. This means other extensions can use a standard API to check for features installed on the server. We use this in Code for IBM i a lot, and the database extension will be using it for the syntax checking feature.

TypeScript conversion

In previous years, Seb worked hard at converting the core extension entirely to TypeScript. Finally, as of EOY 2024, the RPGLE extension has also been converted to TypeScript. Not only did this bring a magnatude of type-safety, it also brought in runtime performance improvements due to tsc telling us what what I was doing wrong in some of the code.

Improved debugger support 🧰

Before mentioning what happened with the debugger this year, I want to reiterate how the development of the debugger works. IBM create the Debug Service and the IBM i Debugger extension, both of which are closed source. The active developer of these is active in the Code for IBM i issues helping solve problems for our users. To make the IBM i Debugger easier to consume for Code for IBM i users, we have to add additional logic to Code for IBM i to manage certificates, start the debugger from the Object Browser, or start it from the active editor.

Seb has mostly led this effort in 2024 and without him, we might not have debugging as part of Code for IBM i at all. Every time changes beyond out control happen - like an update to the Debug Service - Seb is on top of it with a PR ready to go.

This year, we got support for SEP debugging. This means users can debug other IBM i jobs directly from VS Code.

CCSID overhaul 🌍

2024 was the year of the CCSID problems going away (🤞). I spent a solid two weeks writing, testing and debugging a pull-request to once-and-for-all solve the problem of CCSIDs across systems. It would not have been possible without Korinne Adler, who seemingly figured out the problem rather quickly and provided a solution for us. Here's how it went down:

Click me

This led us to creating a component (using our new Component API) called cqsh to solve the CCSID problems. Since then, it seems like a lot of CCSID issues have faded away, though we still encourage out users to ensure their system is setup correctly! It took a lot of testing. We had to write a way to change user profile CCSIDs in our testing system, and run our test suites 5 times over on 3/4 different systems each to ensure the CCSID issues would fade away. I personally want to thank Sanjula Ganepola for his rigorous testing.

RPGLE fixed-format

Towards the end of the year, RPGLE inside of VS Code was given a lot of love. We converted the extension to be fully TypeScript, added support for fixed-format references, and enabled the workspace provider to find exports in entire library lists. That's a big list, and took a lot of testing to get right.

The biggest change was supporting fixed-format RPGLE for references. Previously, references was only supported in free-format RPGLE. Our parser didn't support fixed-format at all. But now, after a re-write of some of the core logic to the parser, we can get fixed-format references. This means improvements to the references and peek views.

For this, we had to bump up our test suites significantly. We went from around 250 tests to 800 in the space of two weeks. We had to add a way to include testing 3rd party libraries/packages written in RPGLE. This allowed us to grow our test cases without writing a lot of new code. It is awesome.

Lastly, we added support for the fixed-format ruler in VS Code - the one like you'd see in SEU!

SQL language features 🔥

The Db2 for IBM i extension got a lot of love this year. The biggest improvements are for the experience when writing SQL. The content assist got better, we added hover support, and coming before the end of the year is going to be a built-in syntax checker for Db2 for i SQL statements. On top of those, we made enhancements to the result set view. Including the ability to edit certain cells in the result set.

None of this would have been possible without Julia or Scott. They both are excellent testers and they are always on top of their game when making sure I do something correctly.

Final words

Last year, in the 2023 year-in-review, I mentioned that Code Coverage was going to be worked on this year. Sadly, I did not get to work on that yet. There are some blockers, since we also want to add a better testing extension in general, which would then include coverage results. I am hoping to work on that in 2025.

Even so, we got a lot of other cool thing done. I am proud of everyone involved. I think this is one of the coolest projects out their in the open-source world (but of course I would say that!). The best part about this project is how many people I get to communicate it. Sometimes it can be overwhelming, but most of the time it's just fab.

I am sure 2025 is going to be another great year.
-Liam

[jwoehr]

Quite a record of achievement, and genuinely transformative ("disruptive"?) of our discipline in a manner and of a magnitude only seen perhaps once a decade. Congratulations to all!

[thebeardedgeek]

These efforts and those of previous years are changing the way we do things for the better in countless ways. Not only are we more productive but we are making things easier for people to learn/consume while showing off the power of this platform. Thank you all for the efforts!!!

I have been able to accomplish more in 2024 than in all previous years of systems administration and development because of the efforts with VS Code and these extensions.

THANK YOU!!!

[mmayer-ermco]

I've added the link to this review to the the IBM i Reference Pages Blog @ http://ibmireference.blogspot.com/ on the IBM i VS Code Page.

[kraudy]

This is the hope of the new generation of IBM i developers

Thanks to all for their effort.