PHP System i Solutions

From modernizing legacy applications and leveraging business logic in your databases to creating PHP web-based applications on IBM i, Zend Solutions for IBM i are designed to help you leverage the power of the IBM i platform to develop, deploy and manage web applications to better connect with your customers, vendors, partners and employees at a significantly lower cost and greater efficiency.

• Minimize the risk and cost of modernizing with PHP
• Maximize your investment in System i infrastructure

Learn more about IBM and Zend delivering PHP for IBM i

Minimize the risk and cost of modernizing with PHP

Applications running on the IBM i platform frequently have been customized and developed over the course of many years.  Rewriting these applications to web-enable them represents significant risk.  Zend and IBM have partnered to enable the ability to provide rich web-front ends while retaining your business logic in RPG and data in DB2/400 in as short period of time as possible.

Access data and applications via browser or Web Services
Organizations leveraging IBM i are looking to provide access to part of an RPG application, access DB2/400 data via a web browser for simple read-write capabilities, or access RPG data and programs as web services enabling usage by a wider audience.  Being able to use PHP on IBM i makes existing PHP-based components and applications available to IBM i customers and also allows PHP applications to easily access IBM DB2 for i data and RPG, COBOL and other business applications -- thus avoiding the risk associated with rewriting business logic.

Zend Solutions for IBM i provide the end-to-end PHP stack required to deliver a seamless out-of-the-box experience running web-based application workloads natively on the IBM i.  Zend products provide the the necessary drivers, libraries and support to enable PHP programs to securely access IBM i data and resources such as IBM DB2 for i, programs, procedures, data areas, data queues, message queues and spool files.

Products: Zend Server for IBM i

Leverage your RPG/COBOL programmers to develop modern web applications
RPG developers are one of your most valuable assets. They understand your business needs and know your applications business logic well and leveraging their expertise is a top requirement in a web-enabled world

One of the advantages of developing applications with PHP and the Zend Solution is that you can develop modern web-based applications quickly.  The procedural origins of PHP, makes it the ideal language for RPG/COBOL developers to develop web applications.  PHP's simplicity along with Zend's development environment, PHP engine and abundant sample code make it easy to build web applications on IBM i.
 
Products: Zend Studio, Zend Server for IBM i,
PHP training courses for RPG developers

Manage web-based PHP applications
When transitioning to a web-based paradigm, application owners often ask, "How can I manage browser-based apps? How do I identify trends that indicate potential problems, and ensure that my apps are meeting their service level agreements?"

Zend Solutions provide monitoring capabilities that give you visibility into PHP applications so you can understand deployment issues, proactively identify potential problems, respond to bottlenecks, and most importantly automate root cause analysis when problems do occur in production.  This eliminates the guess work of managing PHP applications and eliminates the time consuming process of searching through large log files to identify the cause of problems.

Products: Zend Studio, Zend Server for IBM i

Maximize your investment in System i infrastructure

Organizations have selected IBM i because of its scalability, performance, manageability and security.  Rather than offloading web-based workloads onto linux and/or windows servers in front of the IBM i, executives are looking to consolidate workloads onto the i and increase utilization by even running new web-based workloads/applications on the i.

Consolidate applications on the IBM i Platform
PHP is a language that gives you the ability to create portable applications that can run on the i, or linux/windows environments.  A key goal for organizations today is to reduce the effort in managing and maintaining disparate systems – the more workload that can be brought onto the i, the lower is the cost of operations.

Deploy open source applications
In addition to developing your own Web applications with PHP, there are thousands of PHP based open source applications like Wordpress, SugarCRM, Drupal, and Joomla that can now be deployed natively on the IBM i.  These applications were typically written to store their data in the MySQL database as opposed to DB2/400. To support the deployment of these applications on the IBM i platform, IBM and MySQL AB™ partnered to provide the MySQL database on i, and the DB2 Storage Engine for mySQL (to enable seamless accessing/storing of data into your DB2/400 by these mySQL based applications).

Products: Zend Server for IBM i