Calvin Buckley

Optimize Your IBM i Web Application Using FastCGI

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(Co-written with Alan Seiden)

FastCGIFastCGI speeds up web applications by pre-starting and managing jobs for popular languages such as PHP. FastCGI can be configured to handle any language that supports the FastCGI interface, as shown in this FastCGI configuration for node.js. When it comes to PHP, you can trust tools such as Seiden PHP+ siteadd to set good FastCGI defaults. You can also customize fastcgi.conf to accommodate higher traffic, multiple environments, and to solve problems. Read on as we explain how FastCGI works and how to configure it.

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Calvin Buckley

Sending Email from PHP on IBM i

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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:

This article discusses your options for sending email using Seiden PHP+.

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Calvin Buckley

Porting Extensions to PHP 8

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open phpPHP 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.

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Stephanie Rabbani

Installing Composer on IBM i

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Composer, a tool to manage dependencies in PHP applicationsThe open source Composer tool, which manages PHP project dependencies, has become standard equipment for modern PHP. New to this tool? I recommend this introduction to Composer.

Composer automatically installs or updates required components, known as dependencies, and any others required by those initial components. The required components are defined by the developer in an easy-to-read JSON-formatted text file.

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