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Editor’s Note: The information in this article is useful for historical context but is now out of date.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.
If recent customer requests for Git training are any indication, this popular, free, open source tool for managing source code is gaining momentum and will soon be mainstream on IBM i.
Python has been gaining momentum for building utility applications on IBM i, such as creating/reading Excel files, data transfer, process automation, calling REST APIs such as Salesforce and ServiceNow, and application monitoring.
Although some have said that Python would become the “new CL,” one limitation remains. While Python can easily call CL, RPG, and COBOL programs, calls in the other direction—from CL, RPG or COBOL to Python—required extra effort.
When you browse a secure web site or API whose address starts with “https,” what makes the site secure? The site uses a special certificate, provided by a trusted Certificate Authority (CA), to prove that it is legitimate. Until recently, IT shops had to pay for these certificates and generate them manually.
In the last few years, Let’s Encrypt has earned the thanks of technology professionals. Let’s Encrypt, a CA run for the public’s benefit, offers certificates at no charge, along with scripts to generate and regenerate certificates as needed, reducing the effort of keeping certificates up to date, and keeping sites secure.
To manage Node.js application processes in production on IBM i, we recommend PM2 Runtime. As stated in PM2’s official documentation, PM2 “…allows you to keep applications alive forever, to reload them without downtime and facilitate common DevOps tasks.”
Presentation HandoutThe ever-expanding capabilities of Db2 for i can simplify development in open source languages such as PHP, Ruby, Node.js (JavaScript), and Python. These languages, known for their effectiveness in building web and mobile applications, can tap into the power of SQL.
So why complicate them with repetitive code that distracts from their power and simplicity?
I’ve been eagerly watching Liam Allan’s open source ILEditor mature into a very convenient tool that I can turn to whenever I have a quick development task to perform and I don’t have an active RDi session open. So I was thrilled to learn about his plans for the next major release!
The beauty of ILEditor is that it starts up quickly, performs quickly, and lets me return to whatever else I was doing. For example, I recently used it to copy and send some CL code to a client while I was on vacation. So fast!
When modernizing applications, we help organizations select a software architecture that’s flexible, yet can last many years.
A recent article about our client K3S got our attention. Author Alex Woodie wrote that the inventory forecasting software vendor had updated their package with an attractive web-based interface using PHP, while adapting their existing RPG code into APIs written in RPG.
But I knew there was more to this story. So I asked King Harrison IV—K3S’s executive vice president, friend, and founding member of Club Seiden— to elaborate on their choice of RPG APIs.