You might have heard that the major browser vendors were planning to block port 10080 – the port used by Zend Server through ZS 8 (PHP 5.6). Firefox made the first move, then Chrome followed. We have been receiving support requests on this issue since April 2021. Why did the browser vendors block port 10080, and what can you do to get your site working again?
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.
If your application deals with user accounts, it has to deal with passwords. Storing passwords in plain text would be a bad idea; a data breach could allow an attacker access to every account. The obvious answer is to encrypt the passwords. However, using cryptography without understanding could give you a false sense of security—if you make the inappropriate choice, you could make things easier for an attacker without realizing it. This article will focus on getting you up to speed with the best ways to use cryptography to secure passwords.
UPDATE: CommunityPlus+ PHP is now known as Seiden PHP. A modest but powerful utility “stole the show” during last week’s Lunch & Learn with Alan Seiden and Paul Tuohy. Packaged with CommunityPlus+ PHP, Seiden Group’s siteadd creates an Apache HTTP instance and a FastCGI configuration customized for your needs. In seconds, you’ll be able to launch a sample PHP page to test your new web instance.
When a PHP extension has a memory leak, mysterious crashes can result, forcing users to restart the web server for relief.
As official maintainers of the ibm_db2 and PDO_IBM extensions, we’ve been on a quest to find and eliminate any memory leaks from these popular PHP modules.
With such a comprehensive goal, we needed a strategy. For extensions that have comprehensive test suites we decided that, in addition to reviewing the usual regression tests, why not also use the tests to detect leaks?
What follows is a technical look at how we do it.
IBM i developers now have an alternative to proprietary data visualization tools to pinpoint potential bottlenecks in PHP, Python, and Node.js code. QCachegrind, an open source tool developed by KDE, turns raw application profiling data into meaningful graphs and visualizations that highlight a program’s most time-consuming functions.
With reliable email functionality being one of the top concerns of IBM i PHP users, we’ve made sure that Seiden PHP+ includes everything you need to send email. The PHP mail() function works well, as do components such as Zend\Mail and PHPMailer.
Over the past couple of years, we’ve been hearing from disappointed PHP users that mail() didn’t work in other community PHP distributions (and some builds of Zend Server). PHP mail() requires an external program that implements the sendmail interface. If your PHP distribution lacked sendmail or equivalent, you might have received a cryptic error message such as:
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1 |
sh: -t: not found |
This article discusses your options for sending email using Seiden PHP+.
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.
PHP 8 has been the biggest change to PHP in years. While PHP 8’s JIT compiler gets most of the publicity, more significant to most developers would be PHP 8’s changes that encourage better coding practices. PHP 8 pushes developers to use clearer syntax and is stricter with problematic code.
While the PHP runtime itself has improved, what about extensions such as ibm_db2? What changes do extension developers need to make to adapt to PHP 8? As maintainers of the ibm_db2 and PDO_IBM database extensions, we’ve learned what it takes to make PHP extensions compatible with PHP 8.
Secure Shell (SSH) provides the best environment for installing, managing, and running open source software on IBM i. Among SSH’s advantages over QSHELL and QP2TERM: IBM i’s SSH command line works just like SSH on Linux or Windows, helping the IBM i platform appeal to younger developers and admins. Supporting a wide range of Unix programs and open source software, such as git, SSH is our go-to terminal interface for open source and PASE. This article covers how to set up SSH and use it to connect to IBM i servers.