commoneuropecongress2026

Analyzing your database environment can provide significant performance riches, provided you have the right tools for the job. Visual Explain fits the bill, but learning to understand Visual Explain diagrams can be overwhelming and difficult. This session provides an introductory look into how to read and analyze your Visual Explain diagrams to find SQL performance gold.

As the business landscape evolves, so must the technology that supports it. IBM i remains a robust and reliable platform, but many organizations are looking to extend its capabilities beyond traditional RPG development. In this session, we’ll explore how Python brings new life to IBM i — enabling modern, scalable, and open-source application development without abandoning the platform’s trusted stability.You’ll learn how to run modern Python applications natively on IBM i, integrate them with existing RPG and DB2 systems, and gradually modernize legacy code. Through practical examples and migration strategies, we’ll discuss how teams can leverage Python’s rich ecosystem to modernize workflows, enhance productivity, and attract new developer talent — all while preserving the value of their IBM i investment.By the end of this session, you’ll have a clear roadmap for starting your organization’s journey from RPG to Python and unlocking the next generation of IBM i innovation.

In this session, we will explore one of the latest offerings to help you deploy and manage AI workloads at scale: the Wallaroo AI Starter Kit! Now, one can stand up a new AI inferencing stack and integrate it with RPG in minutes!

Artificial intelligence is gradually becoming an essential part of software development; yet many IBM i and Power IT teams still struggle to identify AI use cases that are genuinely useful, manageable, and compatible with their requirements for quality, security, and governance.

On the occasion of the launch of ARCAD MCP Server, ARCAD Software presents a pragmatic approach to AI: using the LLM of your choice to orchestrate and leverage existing expert IT services, whether from ARCAD solutions, without granting direct access to sensitive systems.

Presented by Philippe Magne, CEO of ARCAD Software, and Michel Mouchon, DevOps Business Line Manager, this session will demonstrate how AI can analyze application portfolios, trigger code generation or code review services, enforce security policies, and orchestrate DevOps actions on IBM i.

Ever wondered if you could use Jenkins with IBM i? Guess what, you can! Designing IBM i centric pipelines has never been so easy, thanks to the IBM i pipeline steps plugin. But what about your build artifacts? Seems like they should be hosted somewhere...into an artifact repository like Nexus, perhaps? Join this session to discover why it may be a good idea to build once, store the result of your builds and deploy it many times, to ensure deployment consistency and traceability. And all of this using state of the art open source tools!

The Rest API engine for IBM i (IWS) continues to transform and innovate!  With the recent move to the Jakarta EE runtime engine a whole new world of possibilities arise. In this session we will review the recent change to support Jakarta EE, what does that mean and how to take advantage of these new features. We will include live demo where ever possible to help you understand how powerful and easy to use this integrated features is. The best part, you already own it and its on your system today!

Join us for an in-depth exploration of agentic AI and its transformative potential on the IBM i platform. This session will primarily explore the core concepts of agentic AI, including autonomy, agency, and decision-making, and discuss how these principles can be applied to drive innovation and efficiency for your business. We will examine the current state of agentic AI and its applications. Plus, we will look at some available options for building agentic workflows with your IBM i. To finish off, we’ll provide a sneak peek at some upcoming projects from IBM i development!

We are living through the Fourth Industrial Revolution—a period defined by artificial intelligence, automation, and unprecedented digital transformation. But what does it really mean to live with AI, not just use it?  Let’s explore the promises and pitfalls of AI in everyday life. 

Join us for a deep dive into Git where you will learn the essential concepts every beginner should know — from basic commands to working with branches and resolving merge conflicts. Next, we will explore what the modern development lifecycle looks like for IBM i developers using Git which includes uncovering how objects get built and what tools you will leverage to develop locally on your PC. We will also showcase how to leverage CI/CD pipelines (via GitHub Actions) to automate builds, generate impact analysis, and even run RPG unit tests.

This session explores a spec-driven development approach that combines Bob’s LLM-powered IDE capabilities with the BMAD Agile framework to bring architectural governance and compliance to enterprise RPG development on IBM i.
By leveraging structured requirements, architecture definitions, implementation plans, and continuous validation loops, development teams can effectively guide AI agents throughout the entire software lifecycle. We will demonstrate how multi-role AI workflows—spanning analysis, design, implementation, testing, and review—can accelerate delivery while preserving consistency, traceability, and code quality.
Through practical examples and real-world scenarios, attendees will learn how to evolve AI from a simple coding assistant into a reliable engineering team capable of supporting enterprise-grade RPG development.

You already use AI for everyday tasks, so why not put it to work on one of the most tedious projects on your roadmap?
Migrating to modern software often means reworking hundreds, sometimes thousands, of screens and spool files: slow, repetitive, error-prone work that drags on for months.
 
In this 30-minute session, we will show you how PHL Mirror uses AI to turn that grind into a fast, reliable process so you can reclaim time and accelerate your move to a modern application. You will see exactly how it converts existing screens and spools and what it could mean for your own migration.
 
Come find out how to make migration a breeze instead of a burden.

Modernizing RPG applications is essential for keeping IBM i environments efficient, maintainable, and attractive to new developers — but manually converting decades of fixed-format code to modern RPG Free can be slow, tedious, and error-prone. In this session, we’ll explore how AI can dramatically accelerate and improve the modernization process.We’ll walk through how AI tools can analyze legacy RPG code, identify outdated patterns, and generate clean, maintainable RPG Free equivalents. You’ll see examples of accurate AI-assisted rewrites, automated refactoring strategies, and techniques for preserving business logic while eliminating clutter and old syntax. We’ll also discuss best practices for validating AI-generated output, integrating modernization into your CI/CD workflows, and building a sustainable long-term modernization strategy.By the end of this session, you’ll understand how AI can reduce modernization time from weeks to minutes, empower your existing RPG developers, and create a cleaner, future-ready RPG codebase without disrupting the stability of your IBM i applications.

What is Mapepire: Mapepire is an open-source client to connect applications to the Db2 for i database. It’s written in JavaScript and built using secure web sockets.Benefits of using Mapepire:The existing JDBC and ODBC clients take on very heavy loads to deal with a lot of things. This makes the client code complex. This complex code leads to significant performance overhead. Mapepire clients are lighter as the server part of them is going to take care of the “other things” like encoding. It eliminates native dependencies on the client side. Also the server, the protocol and client part of mapepire being open source, the task of creating new clients in other languages will not at all be taxing as is the case with JDBC and ODBC due to them being not well documented. It’s easy to deploy in cloud environments and also easy to install and use as it is available to install through the commonly used package managers (of different languages) like NPM, Apache maven, PyPi and also Yum.How can customers use it:1. A server component has to be installed first and started on the server. This can be done using yum.2. Getting started with the client is easy and it’s either starting up a daemon server object that will connect with the server component or an API in case of Node.js which connects with IBM i.

Modern IBM i applications increasingly demand sophisticated data handling capabilities beyond traditional character and numeric fields. This technical deep-dive session explores the powerful arsenal of SQL data types available to ILE RPG developers, demonstrating how to leverage CLOBs, BLOBs, and XML structures for real-world business solutions.Through hands-on code examples, attendees will discover practical implementations of Character Large Objects (CLOB) for managing extensive text data, Double-Byte CLOBs (DBCLOB) for multilingual applications, and Binary Large Objects (BLOB) for document and media storage directly within Db2 for i.The session goes beyond basic usage to address performance considerations through LOB Locators, enabling efficient manipulation of large objects without loading entire contents into memory. We'll explore File Reference Variables for seamless integration between IFS files and database LOB columns, demonstrating bidirectional data flow patterns that modernize legacy document management approaches.Special attention will be given to XML_CLOB_FILE handling, showcasing how ILE RPG can natively process XML data structures stored in CLOB fields—a critical capability for web services integration and data interchange scenarios.Each data type will be illustrated with production-ready RPG code snippets, common pitfalls to avoid, and performance optimization techniques. Attendees will leave with immediately applicable knowledge to modernize their IBM i applications, eliminate external file dependencies, and implement robust, database-centric data management strategies that leverage the full power of Db2 for i.

This session demonstrates how to move beyond traditional automation by building intelligent, hybrid workflows that leverage the distinct strengths of AI, the low-code flexibility of n8n, and the rock-solid reliability of the IBM i platform.Attendees will witness a live demonstration of how to construct a complete, end-to-end process. We will explore practical, real-world use cases where AI models analyze data directly from the IBM i, and n8n acts as the central orchestrator to trigger complex business logic, send notifications, and update multiple systems. This presentation is designed to fundamentally change how you think about integration, providing actionable strategies for creating smarter, more responsive, and highly automated business processes.