Announcements
January 5, 2023 By Randy Ruhlow 2 min read

Merlin is IBM i’s newest product to assist clients with IBM i application modernization and DevOps pipeline process development.

Today’s IT and software development teams are evolving their development, delivery and deployment approaches to be more responsive, reactive and efficient. Essentially, they are evolving into DevOps, which is an agile, automated set of software management processes, cultural behaviors, tooling and practices. DevOps elevates the frequency of software delivery, creates higher-quality software, reduces risks and enhances overall responsiveness to ever-changing business demands.

IBM i can participate in and benefit from this accelerated DevOps approach to its software lifecycle management systems. Welcome to IBM i’s Modernization Engine for Lifecyle Integration (Merlin)—IBM i’s newest product to assist clients with IBM i application modernization and DevOps pipeline process development. 

What is Merlin?

Merlin is a browser-based application development and modernization platform for IBM i users—the first of its kind for IBM i. It provides a set of tools that runs in Red Hat OpenShift containers and provides a framework to guide developers in the modernization of IBM i applications. It is based upon the interoperability between IBM i and the Red Hat OpenShift container-based functions.

What does Merlin do for the IBM i platform?

Merlin helps improve the IBM i platform by enabling developers to easily interact with the applications, supporting them with state-of-the-art interfaces for performing modernization and updating applications. Security is always of the utmost importance, and the tools ensure that applications are written securely across the entire development lifecycle through built-in automated security and testing features.

Merlin supports both new and older versions for RPG code. Newer developers may find dealing with fixed-formatted RPG challenging because most other coding languages are in a free-form format. This tool solves the problem by automatically converting fixed-format RPG code to free-form RPG code so any developer can work comfortably with the code. This feature makes the IBM i platform more accessible to different types of developers with varied experiences.

Get started with Merlin

To learn more about how you can make Merlin work for you, please contact Randy Ruhlow at ruhlowr@us.ibm.com or IBM Technology Services at technologyservices@ibm.com. To read our white paper that has more details on Merlin, click here.

Randy Ruhlow
Sr. Managing Consultant

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