How do I get BOB?

[johnstagliano]

Any help is greatly appreciated!!!

I was at powerup last spring and saw local development, deploying to ifs, and using BOB for compiling. I have now setup VS Code to a git repository and have deployment to an ifs directory setup, but, I am not finding any useful information on how to get and setup BOB. When I search VS Code extensions for BOB, I get many many results. Is there any trainings on BOB? Is BOB setup on the IBMi, or my pc, or, in VS Code? Is there a VS Code extension for BOB? Is BOB from VS Code the same as Project BOB? I would like to figure out this last piece of the puzzle. Also, from what I remember, BOB can be used to create programs after deploying changes from VS Code. Can BOB also be used with PHP development on the IBMi for running composer and compiling javascript after changes are deployed? Or, is is strictly for creating objects in the native filesystem?

[sebjulliand]

Hi @johnstagliano ,
you may want to look at BOB's documentation to get started.

You'll also need to installe the IBM i project explorer extension that pairs well with BOB.

BOB must be installed on IBM i using yum.
It's unrelated to project BOB.
It can only be used to build IBM i projects - but since it's only a command that is called to perform the build (i.e. imake), you could come up with a build script that could perform your JS/PHP work afterwards. But BOB itself is intended at building IBM i objects only, as far as I know.

Hope this helps!

[johnstagliano]

Thank you! I was getting very confused as there are a lot of BOBs. And, Project BOB seems to be the hotter topic right now.

[sebjulliand]

You're welcome!
Indeed, the team behind BOB was taken aback by IBM's choice to call Project BOB...BOB 😅