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.

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

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.

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 .

p. If you are in the i5 community then you know the name Erwin Earley. Recently Erwin published an article on itjungle.com on using the Zend Framework. Click on inside and let’s take a look.

TCM.nnet has published an article talking about the cooperation between Zend and IBM to bring PHP to the System i community.

p. The yearly gathering MySQL users, DBAs, vendors and employees is in full-swing. Here’s a look at the first couple of days of activities.

As is the case with most development teams tasked with maintaining legacy applications, most System i shops continue to maintain valuable data that is trapped within their legacy applications. In most cases, these applications are not easily integrated with outsides applications or services. However, System i developers now have a new tool in their toolbox, PHP. PHP provides the tools System i developers need to easily expose their data and services to external applications via Web Services. Utilizing PHP and Zend’s developer tools, Web Services can easily be written to wrap existing programs.

p. The Beta version of the Zend Core 2.0 for i5/OS is released. The Zend Network was updated with the Beta version of the new product.