Open Access for RPG (OAR) has now been out for more than a year and is arguably the most highly praised and criticized feature RPG has ever had. Learn more about what OAR can do for you and the various roles and scenarios it can be of benefit. Learn how you can use OAR to modernize your existing applications and see it in action with some free and open source tooling that uses OAR to communicate with the browser.

HTML5 is the new preferred direction for all new web development and is being pursued instead of things like Adobe Flex/Flash and Microsoft Silverlight because it isn't proprietary. Learn of the new features in HTML5 along with a brief history as to why they were needed. See real world examples of HTML5 being implemented on the UI with RPG/IBMi as the back end. Gain insight as to what out-of-the-box frameworks you can use to build your web and mobile applications more easily without having to have an in-depth knowledge of HTML5.

I recently switched from a Blackberry to a Motorola Google Android (aka Droid) for my mobile device. While sitting in an airport waiting for a delayed flight I decided I would see how much work was involved in creating a simple Android application from scratch. Turns out it only took about 45 minutes and that included downloading the entire Android development environment! That got me excited because I realized I could not only develop something that ran on the Droid platform but also that it could easily communicate with RPG on IBM i using the Open RPGUI free and open source framework. This session will guide you through setting up the Droid development environment on your PC. Then we will develop a “hello world” Droid application and run it in the provided emulator – this means you don't need to own a Droid phone to test this out! Lastly we will walk through a full working example showing how to have the Droid phone talk to Open RPGUI via HTTP. Why would you want to learn how to write Droid applications? Because the Google Android platform is fast becoming one of the most popular mobile device platforms in existence. More and more people are using their mobile devices for things normally done from a laptop or desktop. This means your customers or other internal employees (i.e. C-level executives) will soon start expecting you to offer them the capability to communicate with your data through mobile devices.