Modern Development Environments = Happy Developers
To ensure they can attract the talent they need to keep functioning, IBM i shops are embracing modern development environments to make the platform welcoming to a new generation of technologists
By Andrew Wig
Modern Development Environments =
Happy Developers
To ensure they can attract the talent they need to keep functioning, IBM i shops are embracing modern development environments to make the platform welcoming to a new generation of technologists
By Andrew Wig
One of the keys to recruiting and keeping top talent is creating a work environment they can be comfortable in. That may include cultural factors such as communication styles and attitudes on work-life balance, or physical considerations such as office layout and amenities. But in IT, there’s another environmental consideration that managers have to account for: the development environment.
Companies need to be moving to more modern user interfaces. Young developers don't want to write on green screens, they just don't.
Having enough workers with the skills required to work on IBM Power platforms is still a top concern in the community, and when it comes to recruiting young technologists to replace those who are leaving the workforce, green screens don’t cut it anymore.
“Companies need to be moving to more modern user interfaces. Young developers don't want to write on green screens, they just don't,” Brian May, principal technology evangelist at Profound Logic and former chair of the COMMON Education Foundation, said in an interview with TechChannel.
IBM i is a relatively uncommon subject in computer science education, and developers who weren’t exposed to it in school aren’t likely to have any familiarity with it, May noted. Andrew Langlois, a 2024 TechChannel Rising Star, went to one of the few colleges that offer IBM i courses. In his Rising Stars application, he vividly recalled his introduction to the platform.
“I was confused ... oh so very confused,” he wrote. “What is this green-on-black backdrop? Where's the point-and-click GUI? You mean I need to communicate with the system through the command-line? DDS? Column-dependent source code?”
Comfort Through Familiarity
The Most Popular Development Environments on IBM i
Respondents to Fortra’s 2025 IBM i Marketplace Survey were asked to list the development environments they were using:
RDi
Visual Studio Code
Langlois’ learning experience might have been less jarring had his IBM i introduction been mediated by a more standard development environment. And across platforms, the standard bearer for such interfaces is Visual Studio Code, which was made available as an IBM i extension in 2021.
According to Fortra’s 2025 IBM i Marketplace Survey, VS Code for IBM i is now neck-and-neck with Rational Developer for i (RDi) as the most popular modern development environment on the platform. Despite RDi having been available for over twice as long as VS Code for IBM i, its popularity surpasses VS Code by only 1 percentage point—54% of respondents to Fortra’s survey said they used the tool, compared to 53% for VS Code. (The other modern development tool mentioned in the Fortra report, the 3-year-old Merlin, lags far behind, at 2%.)
Overall, the Application Development Tool Set remains the most popular IBM i development environment, thanks to experienced developers’ high level of familiarity with it, the Fortra survey report stated. “However,” the report continued, “the adoption of cutting-edge practices is essential for attracting and retaining talented software developers, and the wide use of more modern tools like RDi, Visual Studio Code, and Merlin points toward a bright future for young developers working on this platform.”
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VS Code vs. RDi
To make IBM i attractive to young developers, “for me, the key is VS Code,” May said, “ … because Visual Studio Code is the most popular development environment for all languages.” That level of familiarity, he continued, “just completely eliminates one barrier.”
VS Code’s popularity is boosted by the fact that it’s free—always an important factor in adoption, especially for young developers who are just getting their start, May noted. He added that cost is VS Code’s major advantage over its counterpart, RDi, which still has some features that VS Code doesn’t. For example, he believes that RDi’s Outline View is still superior to VS Code, “but that’s improving.”
VS Code can’t yet do everything RDi can do, but the same is also true in reverse, May said. “At this point, it's kind of a preference thing, but if we're focusing on younger developers, chances are they've used VS Code and they probably haven't used Eclipse, which is what RDi is based on.”
VS Code “just completely eliminates one barrier.”
The state of watsonx Code Assistant for i
Helps developers understand and document applications written in RPG
Planned Capabilities ⟶
Generate, test and transform RPG code
Release Stage ⟶
Public preview (join the waitlist here); general availability planned for second half of 2025
Source: “IBM watsonx Code Assistant for i—the Journey Begins,” by Steve Will, IBM i CTO
Modern Tongues
Just as young developers appreciate modern development environments, they also prize the chance to work with modern coding languages. On IBM i, those are exemplified by free-format RPG, available in RPGLE, which bears similarity to many other languages, May noted. “It kind of feels like most other languages. It's not a huge transition,” he said.
Also helping to ease young developers’ transition to IBM i is the high degree of familiarity they tend to have with JavaScript, since that's what Node.js, the popular runtime environment for IBM i, is based on. Whether you’re a Java developer or a .Net developer, “you have to know JavaScript for your front end. So it's kind of one of those languages everyone has to know to some extent,” May said.
For cases where developers have to work with old RPG, they will soon have access to help in the form of watsonx Code Assistant for i. The generative AI tool, slated for general availability this year, helps developers understand RPG code, in addition to other capabilities planned for the tool. “Watson X Code assistant for i is going to be a huge help, even in the early stages where it's just helping to explain what the code's doing, helping you understand the syntax, which is a big part of it,” May said.
A Learner-Friendly Platform
There are many reasons IBM i doesn’t have the name recognition of other platforms, but it is not a difficult platform to learn, according to May. One clue to that lies in its name—the “i” stands for “integrated,” meaning there isn’t a catalog of disparate components to learn.
“It's probably one of the easiest as far as enterprise environments are concerned, because you don't have to worry about all of the complexities. Most of that's already been handled for you. You can just write business code, which is the strength of the platform,” May said.
Through his past work with the COMMON Education Foundation and his regular attendance at IBM Power conferences like COMMON’s POWERUp, May routinely has the honor of seeing the light bulb go on for young technologists who are just discovering IBM i.
