CNX Support. The new features included with Valence 4.2 are summarized in last month’s Cat-out-of-the-Bag post, with one significant addition: The mobile version of Nitro iAdmin is now included with the Valence Framework. This handy mobile app makes it possible to perform common IBM i administrative tasks while you’re on-the-go with your SmartPhone. Common uses of iAdmin inclue answering jobs in MSGW status, reenabling disabled users or devices, monitoring system load, viewing or moving spool files, and much more. As with previous new Valence releases,...Learn More

REST-based web service, with the other end being the “consumer” of said service. Consider this scenario:  You want to give a VIP customer the ability to have their system automatically contact your system to obtain real-time shipment status updates for specific orders being fulfilled by your company.  And as luck would have it, you’ve already done the legwork to create an order inquiry Valence app on your system, complete with an RPG program that provides the necessary data for these shipments in JSON format.  So with...Learn More

How time flies!  We’re well into September now, which means we’re just over a month away from the next major release of Valence, version 4.2. While there are a number of goodies being incorporated into this newest release, the biggest items for Valence 4.2 are: PHP support JSON-based web service functionality A new solution for running 5250 programs in the Valence Portal Here’s a quick breakdown of the details behind these features… PHP Back End Support Of all the feature requests...Learn More

With the recent introduction of Polish as our ninth spoken language translation in the Valence Portal, developers now have yet another option for supporting multilingual installations running on IBM i. Even if your company does not currently have a multilingual user base, if it may someday become multilingual as a result of international acquisitions or mergers, there are some simple steps you can take in your app development today to make the process of supporting multiple languages on your Valence applications down the road relatively simple. The key to multilingual support in...Learn More

As you roll out more and more Valence apps to your IBM i users, it’s only a matter of time before you receive a call from someone claiming a program didn’t respond with the expected data, or took too long to respond. Or perhaps it didn’t respond at all! Of course, getting pertinent cause-and-effect details from users in these cases can sometimes be rather challenging. Information such as “Which button did you click?” or “What did you type in?” is often surprisingly hard to come...Learn More

Ever wished you could save and test your front-end development work locally, on your own PC or laptop, then push it to your IBM i only when it’s ready for user testing or production? Turns out this is indeed something you can do! Using this process, the changes you make during development are completely local to your PC, thereby not affecting any deployed Valence app in the interim. This approach is also particularly handy when you’re developing apps with Sencha Architect, as the volume of...Learn More

IBMSystems Magazine recently profiled  JFW vineyards, makers of Kendall Jackson wines. JFW vineyards cover 15,500 acres in 6 California counties. JFW migrated from the Microsoft* Visual Basic platform to the open CNX Valence interface tool. By doing so, it developed a real-time environment that feeds critical manufacturing data to its back-end systems, creating a streamlined method to ensure that its wines are of the highest quality and welcome on the palates of even the most discerning oenophiles.Learn More

Old UI habits die hard!  You may have developed some of the most beautifully functional and user-friendly Valence apps for your company, but the green screen legacy can still be hard to overcome. So long as your company’s operations require at least some 5250 programs to be used — as is typical for IBM i sites that have been around for a while — then persuading users to flip from Client Access over to their web browser to do, say, a quick...Learn More

Features native portal app for iOS devices and updated user interface components CHICAGO, IL. CNX announced today the general availability of version 4.1 of the Valence Framework for IBM i. Valence 4.1 introduces new options for developing and running IBM i applications on iOS devices (iPad/iPhone), as well as support for a new set of front-end components for regular desktop apps. Back-end support for IBM i OS 7.2 is also included with this release.  “We’ve seen demand for mobile applications in...Learn More

Imagine this scenario:  You’ve developed and deployed a beautiful Valence-based customer order entry app to replace your company’s former green screen program.  Your customer service users can now easily launch the app to initiate new orders, quickly fill out the mandatory header fields and enter item details for the order.  All is well! But then one day, while in the middle of entering an exceptionally large order, one of your users gets distracted and inadvertently closes the order entry app before hitting Save.  Poof!  All their...Learn More

As you develop and deploy new web or mobile apps for your Valence users on IBM i, inevitably you will run into situations where you’re tempted to hard-code global values into your program to control the behavior of your app.  For instance, perhaps you have a situation where you want to default a date field value out by 10 days, so you place code in your program to take the current date and add 10, knowing that someday some user will inevitably be asking...Learn More

Note to Valence 5.* developers: Please reference the Valence 5 User Guide for more recent information on customizing your Valence 5 portal instance. Out of the box, the web portal included with Valence Framework 4.0 provides a great foundation for building up your repository of IBM i-based web and mobile apps.  But many developers quickly find they want to take things a step further and give the portal a look and feel that is more reflective of their corporate identity.  Simple aesthetic tweaks,...Learn More

We’re happy to report that the latest build of Valence Framework 4.0 includes a fully functional Beta version of the much-anticipated Nitro AutoCode app.  This latest addition to the Nitro family allows developers to quickly generate Valence apps using a wizard-like interface.  You can literally produce a completely functional app — including both the RPG and the user interface — from scratch in less than a minute!  You can then call up the resulting app in Sencha Architect to quickly...Learn More