CNX is pleased to announce that Valence Version 6.2 is now generally available for download. Released as a Beta at the COMMON Expo in Denver last month, production build 6.2.20230515.0 marks the (gasp!) 19th major version of Valence since the original unveiling of Valence 1.0 at RPG World in Las Vegas way back in 2008.
Recently I've had some fascinating conversations with people regarding Nitro App Builder, the low-code app builder included with Valence. In case you've never heard of it before, Nitro App Builder is a tool that's quickly taking over as the development method of choice for many apps that would have been coded manually in Valence just a year or two ago. It creates really useful apps by configuring them interactively, with little or no programming required.
With IBM i turning 30 I thought it would be fun to recap the evolution of this amazing operating system over the years from my perspective. The first system I ever worked on was a model B50 way back in 1991, and of course it was called AS/400 at the time. I thought the machine was pure magic with its tan towers and reel-to-reel tape drive (some of you may have to look that up).
Twenty-two years ago today we officially registered CNX as an Illinois corporation (wow, that's a shocking thing for us to write), so we thought it might be fun to take a short trip down memory lane on this blog post. So much has transpired in those years that we could write a book, so we will necessarily need to keep it brief here — perhaps one of us will write that book later!
Anyway here it goes:
Your IBM i HTTP Server powered by Apache is a powerful web-serving system akin to a bank staffed with multiple fast-working tellers. The AJAX requests coming in from your front-end apps are like customers entering the bank to perform transactions. Each "customer" queues up in an orderly line on a first-in/first-out basis, and is serviced by the next available "teller" as soon as they're finished dealing with the prior customer.
Nitro Query apps containing charts or graphs can make conveying your company's business trends or performance metrics much more effective than showing raw numbers alone. It's particularly common (and easy) to create a dashboard app 
that includes a grid of monthly sales details supplemented by a chart showing month-to-month performance. This adds some great context to the lists of numbers.
Just about every business has a situation where users need to perform a single process against multiple items in one pass. For example, you might have a list of open
invoices that you'd like to flag as ready for payment, or a group of inventory items that you would like to transfer out of a special holding area.
Wrapping up 2017 with a simple but powerful tip for Nitro Query grid apps... Very often lists of business data include columns that can be classified as boolean, with text representing values of yes/no, true/false, 1/0, etc. When you're creating a Nitro Query grid app that includes such columns, you can make "truthy" values stand out much more clearly by replacing the column text with a visual checkmark. 
Power Servers running IBM i are remarkably stable systems, to such a degree that it's easy to overlook those rare occasions when something on the system has gone awry and requires operator attention. When an exception does occur, many IBM i sites have third party monitoring tools or home-grown software in place to notify system administrators that an issue has occurred that may require some kind of action.
Whether you're a seasoned SQL pro or just learning the ropes of SQL syntax on IBM i, the SQL parser built into Nitro Query App Builder is an invaluable tool you can leverage to quickly generate a web-based report for your users, or even a file maintenance application containing multiple joined files. SQL-based data sources were introduced in Valence 5.1 back in May 2017, and the feature was formally removed from Beta status this month.