NAViGATE 2026 at IBM TechXchange

Service programs are one of the most powerful features available to RPG developers. By modularizing code into reusable procedures, you can simplify maintenance, improve consistency, and speed up development across your team. In this session, we’ll start with the fundamentals of creating and binding service programs, then walk through real-world examples that show how they can transform your applications. Along the way, we’ll cover advanced techniques, common pitfalls, and best practices to help you take full advantage of this essential RPG tool. Whether you’re new to service programs or looking to refine your skills, you’ll come away with practical strategies and code samples you can put to work right away.

Service programs have been around for quite some time. Perhaps you’ve even bumped into one in your professional travels. You will certainly find them on the road to application modernization. This session focuses on what they are, how to implement them and making them a regularly used asset during your application development. In this session we will discuss service programs, program signatures and using binder language.

You hear modern RPG but, what does that actually mean? we will look at converting from monolithic programs to modular programming including the use of service program and converting RLA(Record level access) to sql.

REST APIs have become a major part of business programming. We live in a world where virtually everything is connected to the Internet, and REST APIs are how they communicate with each other. In this session, you will learn how to call (or "consume") REST APIs from good ol' RPG. In addition to showing you the basics of how APIs work, this session explains how to use several free tools to consume them. The tools will be compared so that you can determine which one would work best for you.

How to get started using the Integrated File System from your RPG programs. The IFS is typically used for reading and writing "PC-style" (stream) files on the IBM i, and is an important tool for integrating with open source software, other platforms and and business partners. In today's world, it is indispensible.

In the modern IT world, data in different languages and move over in data in different writing system must be exchanged, maintained and stored. For data exchanged over the web in JSON or XML format is UTF-8. In UTF-8 a single character can have 1-4 Bytes. For RPG developers, this brings new challenges: By default, RPG automatically converts all data – including constants, variables, external data structures, and columns in tables processed via Native I/O – into the job’s CCSID at runtime. This behavior can have serious consequences when certain characters cannot be converted and are replaced by substitution characters, leading to potential data loss. Length calculations and alphanumeric built-in functions can also produce unexpected results, since RPG internally operates in bytes rather than characters. This becomes a problem as soon as multi-byte characters are involved. Since IBM i 7.2, it has been possible to define variables with a specific CCSID, such as UTF-8. But what about all the other data objects that are not explicitly defined this way?

After demonstrating the fundamentals of a procedure, I will demonstrate the benefits of procedure driven RPG. Together, we’ll explore real world examples of how this mindset has improved code written by myself and my team with regards to three facets: Readability, maintainability and reusability. All three of these benefits translate into a more efficient development team. We'll finish with some real-world examples showing how AI code assistants can really shine when working in a world of procedures.

With each new release of the IBM i operating system and with Technology Refreshes, IBM has given us some new features in RPG. This session tells you about the new and exciting features of RPG and how you might like to use each feature in your own applications.