Mike Pavlak is a Solutions Consultant and IBM i Series expert. In this podcast Mike talks a little bit about where he's come from, the history of PHP on the i and, what I think is most interesting, what it is that PHP developers can learn from the "old-school" RPG developers and vice versa. Remember the quote "Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it"? While programmers have a tendency to look forward to the brightness of the future there is a lot that can be learned by looking back at where we came from.  And, surprise, it turns out that there's a lot we can learn from each other.

This FREE event will help you learn how to leverage the power of the IBM i platform to develop, deploy and manage web applications.

The Virtual Conference has the advantages of a traditional conference without any of the travel time and cost! Attend an educational session, ask questions, visit a trade show booth, interact with other industry professionals and pick up valuable literature – all from the comfort of your office!

Welcome to the new, ZendCon 2009 edition of the ZendCon Sessions! The podcast that rebroadcasts sessions/talks from the last ZendCon PHP Conference. This episode of The ZendCon Sessions was recorded live at ZendCon 2009 in San Jose, CA and features Sam Hennessey giving his talk: “PHP – Faster And Cheaper. Scale Vertically with IBM i”

A number of industry leaders have comes together and made an announcement. A new Simple Cloud API is being developed for PHP, that will create an easy way to interface with any number of cloud services. The current contributors to this project include Zend, Microsoft, IBM, Rackspace, Nirvanix, and GoGrid.

You’ve successfully installed the Zend Core for i5 on your System i. Now what? This tutorial helps you write your first PHP scripts on the System i. You will learn where Zend Core is located on the System i, how to make sure Zend Core is running, how to set up Zend Studio, how to write a simple ‘hello world’ script, and how to access a DB2 file on the System i.

Get your PHP project done faster and save money by scaling it vertically with IBM Power Systems

There are many business web applications written in PHP4 that use the Informix module for data access. PHP4 is no longer supported and as a result will not be issued any more fixes or releases. Since version 5.2, the Informix module is no longer available for the PDO module.

In this article I’ll to describe how to compile and install the Informix module on the Zend Core 2.5 (PHP 5.2.6)

Zend Platform on IBM I provides many benefits including monitoring and advanced debugging. One of the many key features of Zend Platform is caching. In a nutshell, Zend Platform caches PHP scripts and content in a byte-code format to improve performance. This is an extremely useful feature, especially when you start exploring frameworks like Zend Framework or Cake. Zend Platform has many dials and controls which affect caching on the IBM i. We are going to explore how a few of them work and shed some light on their purpose.

Looking forward to getting your hands sticky with all manner of PHP 5.3 goodness? Well, you can get started early: IBM developerWorks has posted the second part of John Mertic’s article on what to expect in the upcoming version of PHP. Part 1 focused on changes in the PHP object model; Part 2 discusses closures and lambda functions. Essential reading for all developers engaged in developing PHP applications!

I have been with Zend for a little over six months now and boy has it been an exciting time. With the economy at near record peaks and valleys, the value proposition of Open Source solutions is stronger than ever. Both software vendors and SAAS providers are watching their balance sheets very closely. Today, more than ever, folks are taking a second and third look at Open Source solutions. Those that have been playing have a decided advantage. Those that are looking now are wise to explore what the community has to offer. Especially when you consider that you can take an open source application, load it on your Power i and be up and running in less than a day! Integration might take a little longer, but the trip gets a lot shorter as a result of running the solution on Power i .