PHP as an addition to native resources on IBM System i

IBM midrange Systems, formerly AS/400 or iSeries were almost always closed systems in the past. No IT manager wanted to open up there towards the Internet and they solved the business largely with native i5 resources alone.

Initially through the establishment of the Internet in our daily business and private life, it increased the demand for integrated Web applications with Internet connectivity on IBM's midrange systems.

Perhaps some of you remember the often horrified facial expressions of IT managers when they were seriously confronted with the issue of Web access. An often decades-long sheltered world should now be made available via the Internet to different groups of people and applications.

It was these days still a technical problem, because the existing software architectures with CL, RPG/Cobol and DB/400 offered only a few possibilities in the direction of establishing web applications. There were also important aspects, such as investment protection and security, which should be reasonably addressed also.

We must therefore find a way to combine existing native resources safely with new Internet technologies.

An elegant and affordable variant of solution on IBM System i is the use of PHP in addition to the existing native programs. PHP as a development language for Internet applications provides the opportunity to use both of the worlds without the need for abandon the others. Instead, it provides several ways to make existing native System i applications available on the Internet. It is quiet easy for RPG developers to learn PHP normally.

Zend certified PHP stack provides an i5 Toolkit for midrange systems. The i5 Toolkit is a System i specific command extension in PHP, which allows direct access to the native System i resources from PHP.

Thus, web applications on IBM System i can access directly with the aid of PHP to the database DB/400, CL, RPG or COBOL programs and allows site access to system values, Job Queues, spool files, etc.

The integrated development environment of Zend Studio i5 and Zend Platform or Zend Server as an application server on midrange systems offers developers many code templates, debugging and analyzing tools.

RPG programs could be made available via web services on the Internet. In this way you can connect future or existing Web applications with native System i applications. Zend Studio offers for this purpose complete source code examples via commands, which just makes life easier for beginners especially in PHP.

Furthermore, via the 5250 Bridge you can run native System i applications in the browser, which represents a fast and affordable option for application integration across both worlds and migration projects.

The system architecture in conjunction with Zend Platform and Zend Server on IBM System i provide a high degree of security and prevent unauthorized access from outside.

In summary it can be said, that PHP as an add-on for web applications on IBM midrange systems is a secure and innovative platform and in addition to protect previous invests it can even be really fun also.