Zend and i5/OS

Overview

Benefits

Products

Getting started

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 together to provide an integrated and open Web application deployment environment using PHP on i5/OS.

PHP is a powerful, open, and easy-to-use Web application environment that has the support of a large community with more than ten thousand 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 i5/OS customers and developers offering improved productivity and rapid deployment. Having PHP capabilities for i5/OS makes available existing PHP-based components and applications to i5/OS customers. PHP applications are easily integrated with data in IBM DB2 for i and RPG, COBOL, and other business applications on i5/OS. With millions of PHP developers, i5/OS customers have access to a large pool of skilled resources for Web enablement projects.

Read the "IBM System i Integration with PHP" brochure (64KB)

Zend Core for i5/OS provides developers with an easy to use, open, and integrated PHP application environment. The i5/OS operating system delivers enterprise reliability, security, and scalability to PHP applications. The i5/OS 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 Core 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 i5/OS. The toolkit includes support for Program call, Procedure call, Data Area, Data Queue, Message Queue, Commands, and System values.