I got the chance to attend the php|tek conference in Chicago last week and it really opened my eyes to a lot of things. You see, the event was attended mostly by members of the PHP community supporting the LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP…) stack. Since I was probably the ONLY i5 guy at the event I felt a little out of place. Aside from being over dressed (I wore a collared shirt) nearly everyone I talked to had not heard of the i5. And when Andi Gutmans, Zend Founder and CTO, gave the keynote and mentioned the i5 twice, nary a head was turning. But that’s OK. Maybe next year we will see a considerable improvement in the i5 community attendance, if you catch my drift. (more…)

Welcome to my blog where I will share the straight dirt on PHP in the IBM midrange community and more. Within these pages will be all kinds of discussion, opinion, example code, etc. to help any i5 programmer move forward with adopting PHP as their web development language of choice and possibly lighten your day. Whether you adopt the full suite of Zend tools or not, there will be valuable content posted for the world to review. Also, I welcome inquiries regarding how PHP impacts the IBM midrange community and suggestions for areas where Zend can improve its relationship with the community.

Before joining Zend I was a passionate advocate for PHP on the IBM Power i server. Now I actually get paid to follow my passion! How cool is that? The real point I’d like to make here is that if you don’t think PHP is ready for enterprise then guess again. Zend is delivering and I just bet my career on it

As it is only my second day on the job I am a little short on content for this first posting and I am waiting for my new laptop to be delivered. I promised not to say anything bad about the delay under the threat that IT would install Vista… So welcome! And please feel free to share some of the things that might be of interest that I can add to my regular rantings regarding PHP and the IBM Power i. Currently, I am working on a piece for SystemiNetwork on the implementation of PHP CLI on IBM i/OS. People always ask me about how to call an RPG program from a PHP script which is well documented in the user guide. PHP CLI allows the developer to do the reverse and call a PHP script from an RPG or CL program.

Regards,

Mike