Zend and IBM i

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IBM, Zend and PHP: An Integrated Approach

An open and integrated infrastructure can give you added flexibility and choice in adapting to new challenges and opportunities, while taking advantage of your current investments and assets. Customers who need to create innovation in their business and are looking for an easy, cost-effective and rapid way to deploy Web applications can experience a new and integrated solution from IBM and Zend Technologies, Inc., who have teamed up to provide an integrated and open Web application deployment environment using PHP on IBM i.

PHP is a powerful, open, and easy-to-use Web application environment that has the support of a large community with thousands of applications and components to share. It is an open source scripting language that is designed for Web application development and enables very simple scripting. Short for "PHP: Hypertext Preprocessor," PHP is widely used for content management, customer relationship management, database access, ecommerce, forums, blogs, wikis, and other Web-based applications. With more than 20 million Internet domains and countless more intranet sites, PHP is gaining attention within the development community and enterprises around the world.

With its easy-to-use development approach, PHP is a natural fit for IBM i customers and developers offering improved productivity and rapid deployment. Having PHP capabilities for IBM i makes available existing PHP-based components and applications to IBM i customers. PHP applications are easily integrated with data in IBM DB2 for i and RPG, COBOL and other business applications on IBM i. With millions of PHP developers, IBM i customers have access to a large pool of skilled resources for Web enablement projects.

Why PHP on IBM i

Zend Server Community Edition for IBM i provides developers with an easy to use, open, and integrated PHP application environment. The IBM i operating system delivers enterprise reliability, security and scalability to PHP applications. The IBM i operating system comes with built in relational database, security, communication and networking capabilities, online help, Web enablement technologies, easy enterprise management and much more.

Zend Server Community Edition includes extensions and a toolkit that enables PHP applications to easily access DB2 for i data (via SQL and native database access methods) and take advantage of RPG and COBOL applications in IBM i. The toolkit includes support for Program call, Procedure call, Data Area, Data Queue, Message Queue, Commands, and System values.