My friend Jean-Georges Perrin - owner of GreenIvory - has developed the first iPhone application for Informix adminstrators. The application provides information about certain Informix key commands from version 7.31 thru 11.70.

• Informix "Panther" includes many inovations, so did GreenIvory

IBM strengthens Informix-Team with Young Professionals

IBM reacts to the heavy demand for Informix Dynamic Server, which was voted the product with the highest customer satisfaction in a recent survey.

I am glad to introduce Jannis Dorlöchter on The Informix-Zone who will start, as of now, as a Technical Enablement Consultant. Jannis is assigned to the IBM Lab in Böblingen, Germany.

Start Developing with the Linux/IDS Virtual Appliance

Amazing news for developers ! The IBM/Informix team has created a virtual appliance based on VMWare and Suse Linux. The appliance allows developers to get familiar with INFORMIX technology and immediately start the development of applications that work with this superior IBM data server.

You can find more detailed information about the IDS Virtual Appliance at Guy's Blog:

I discovered a new blogger today. This post was pointed out to me by another IBMer:

There are three main benefits adoption of one platform over another can offer a developer. These benefits are captured in the following "laws" of platform adoption  

1. Developers adopt a platform when it offers differentiation from competitors: In competitive software markets, building an application that stands out from the crowd is important. Platforms or technologies that enable developers to provide features that are unique to the application, even just temporarily, are thus valuable to developers in such markets. Typically, if these features are truly valuable to end users this leads to a "keeping up with the Joneses" effect where the majority applications in that space eventually adopt this platform. Recent examples of this include Flash video, AJAX and the Flickr API.

Extending the Open Admin Tool (OAT)

If you like programming in PHP, you might be interested in developing new functionality for the OAT (Open Admin Tool). A new Plug-In Manager makes it now easier to develop and integrate your own OAT PHP modules. An interesting article from Erika Von Bargen, which describes this new functionality, has been recently published on IBM developerWorks:

IBM on Demand Webcasts

New IBM on Demand Webcasts covering Informix Dynamic Server are available at the IBM website (registration required):

• Carlton Doe - Developing IDS applications for Mac OS X
• Jacques Roy - Developing and managing transaction intensive solutions for your industry

A whole bunch of new INFORMIX articles

During the last 3-4 weeks a whole bunch of interesting new articles about INFORMIX technology has been published on IBM developerWorks.

First of all I like to promote the article about IDS/Linux/Xen written by my friend Martin Fuerderer (IBM IDS development group Munich/Germany) and Nicole Neubuerger (student at the University of Applied Sciences Munich). The article provides a great overview about IDS running on Linux in a Xen virtual machine:

Informix Code Exchange at IBM developerWorks

Share your clever scripts and code snippets on the the new Informix Code Exchange website at IBM developerWorks:

• IBM developer Works - Informix Code Exchange

Another great place to look for existing scripts and programs around IDS is the Software Repository at IIUG:

Creating a Powerful Mixture

This article describes the database interfaces of popular script languages like Perl, PHP, Python or Ruby which provide direct access to data stored in Informix Dynamic Server.