IBM i computer, formerly named AS/400, iSeries, i5
IBM i users have a new way to request enhancements from IBM. The Request for Enhancement (RFE) site has been replaced by the IBM Power Ideas Portal.
I immediately noticed an advantage of the new portal—we can now share links without requiring the recipient to log in! The new site seems faster, too.
Since IBM announced Yum support for installing the IBM i Db2 ODBC driver, as documented in our recent tutorial, users can update their driver more easily.
To help users determine what’s changed, IBM maintains a list of fixes and enhancements for each IBM i ODBC driver release.
UPDATE: CommunityPlus+ PHP is now known as Seiden PHP.
The May 3, 2022 announcement of IBM i 7.5 and IBM i 7.4 TR6 gave us a lot to unpack. It rolled up many enhancements from previous TRs, then threw in a new subscription option for IBM i and a new modernization framework called Merlin.
If you’re running Seiden’s CommunityPlus+ PHP, no worries. It’s compatible with IBM i 7.5.
Here’s a collection of the articles and podcasts we found to be most informative for IBM i application development teams.
One of the open source components we’ve built at Seiden Group is a new extension to enhance PHP’s integration with IBM i.
Although most business requirements are met by the existing ibm_db2 and PDO_ODBC extensions plus the PHP Toolkit, the new php-ibmi makes it easier to accomplish several (formerly) difficult or impossible tasks—especially for tool vendors, and when troubleshooting.
We’ve built six functions thus far, with the possibility of more in the future. Let us know what you think.
Setting up the open source environment on IBM i from Access Client Solutions (ACS) is usually easy, but sometimes you can run into problems. The most common error is when ACS claims that the environment is already set up (“bootstrapped”), when in fact it isn’t.
If you download files onto your system using PHP, Yum, RPM, or other tools, there’s a good chance curl is involved.
The version of curl provided in IBM i PASE uses multiple threads to speed up common tasks such as DNS lookups. When threading support is not available, however, curl fails.
If you’re using Rational Developer for i (RDi) for most of your development tasks, you might want to use it for PHP, too. RDi is based on Eclipse, so we can use the Eclipse PHP Development Tools (PDT) with RDi.
However, there are some additional steps to take and quirks to be aware of. This post provides the steps for a trouble-free installation of PDT, with tips to resolve common issues.
Want to read source member data from within an IBM i shell environment, such as SSH, QShell, or QP2TERM? Need to copy records from a text file to a physical file? Want a quick way to upload a save file without needing FTP?
IBM i’s Rfile command can do all these things easily. Rfile is designed to be easy to integrate into scripts, so it’s a great tool to have at hand.
MySQL and MariaDB have long been databases used in the Linux world for popular web apps in PHP and other languages. The collective development components—Linux, Apache, MySQL and PHP—are often called the LAMP stack. When PHP was released on IBM i in 2006, the combination of IBM i, Apache, MySQL and PHP became known as the iAMP stack.
If you’re running web applications, database servers, FTP, SSH, or other network programs, the IBM i NETSTAT command can tell you what is connecting to your system, which ports are in use, which programs are listening for network connections, and more.