UPDATE: CommunityPlus+ PHP is now known as Seiden PHP.
Recently Alan presented a session on the state of PHP on IBM i at the RPG & DB2 Summit, including community PHP and our CommunityPlus+ PHP offering. The session recording below also shows a live demo of GRAR’s award-winning website, migrated to CommunityPlus+ PHP with excellent results.
UPDATE: Community PHP is now known as Seiden PHP.
Seiden Group is delighted to announce an exclusive partnership with Chubu System Co., Ltd. (CSC) that brings business-ready Community PHP for IBM i to organizations in Japan.
The joint service offering, known as CS^2, includes migration to Community PHP, access to an enhanced, tested repository of PHP RPMs, and responsive technical support.
I recently caught up with Seiden Group CTO Stephanie Rabbani about the ODBC driver that’s quickly becoming standard for open source and web connections on Db2 for i.
UPDATE: CommunityPlus+ PHP is now known as Seiden PHP.
Considering a move to RPM-based Community PHP? You’ll need the free, open source PHP Toolkit to connect your PHP applications to resources on your IBM i.
Co-developed by Alan Seiden and maintained by the IBM i community, the toolkit is also known as the XML Toolkit. That’s because the PHP front end and the XMLSERVICE RPG back end communicate via XML.
In our current work with RPMs, we’re adding digital signatures to our PHP packages to enhance their security.
Package Signing ensures the integrity of a package at rest by detecting and deterring tampering. A package is signed with a private key, which is then validated by the public key provided by the package builder and installed by the user. This technique complements TLS encryption, which guards against tampering and snooping in transport.
UPDATE: CommunityPlus+ PHP is now known as Seiden PHP.
Just one year away from end-of-life for no-charge Zend Server “Basic”—and six months after the release of Community PHP—many IBM i shops face an important decision:
“Do we upgrade to a paid Zend Server license,
or do we migrate to RPM-based PHP?”
At a recent MAGiC User Group webinar, Alan Seiden and Richard Schoen teamed up to present a tutorial and demo on how to get started with Community “RPM” PHP, sharing several tips picked up during client migrations.
UPDATE: Community PHP is now known as Seiden PHP.
Last week, Perforce announced plans to withdraw Zend Server for IBM i “Basic” by June 2021. Filling the gap is “community” PHP for IBM i, installable in RPM format.
Seiden Group has been assisting IBM i clients to adopt Community PHP since its introduction last year. We’ve helped with both first-time PHP installations and migrations from Basic.
Since last month’s post about free and open PHP on IBM i, we have been helping companies to get started with it.
We’ve seen excellent results with the open PHP package, known as an RPM. Starting with the PHP repository provided by IBM and Zend (Perforce) as a base, we are able to optimize PHP for the needs of each IBM i shop.
Especially appealing to us and our clients: this PHP is 64-bit and leans toward open standards, including ODBC. In exchange for a bit of setup time, you’ll have a system that’s lightweight, flexible, and has no license fees for end users.
Editor’s Note: The information in this article is useful for historical context but is now out of date. We currently recommend Seiden PHP+ as the most reliable PHP distribution for IBM i.
A new flavor of PHP has arrived in IBM i-land. Some call it “free.” Some call it “community.” As described in a recent IT Jungle article, PHP is now available on IBM i as a lean RPM download that does not require Zend Server.
Our friends at IBM and Zend (now Perforce) have packaged a bare-bones PHP edition for customers who want PHP but don’t feel they need to purchase the extra tools of Zend Server.
I’ll share what our open source experts at Seiden Group have learned as we’ve installed and optimized both traditional Zend Server and “open” PHP for our customers.
Session Handout500 internal server error? Wait, now it’s a 404 error. I think it’s actually a syntax error. And now my program call isn’t returning anything. My page doesn’t look right, and my Javascript is not working.