The IBM i Programmer's Guide to PHP

This is the first book to comprehensively address PHP and how it can—and should—be deployed on the IBM i. With this IBM i-specific point of view, the authors examine how to transfer skills from a green screen environment to the Web, become intimately familiar with PHP’s commonly used features, and help start down the road of highly interactive Web-based application development.

For decades, the green screen has been the ubiquitous interface into an organization’s data. But with the advent of HTML, the Internet, and the browser, combined with the end user’s existing familiarity with the Web, green-screen developers are seeing much of the demand for their skills diminish in favor of more Web-enabled technologies. One of those technologies is the PHP programming language.

A flexible, forgiving programming style makes PHP easier to learn, and is just one of the many reasons PHP tops the list when developers seek to improve their Web-related skills. While not limited to Web development, PHP is designed from the ground up to be the ideal environment to easily build simple or complex Web-based applications in the most effective manner possible, while still giving programmers the control they need.

With this book you will learn to:

> Build basic PHP applications and how to structure them

> Access local and remote resources, as well as external data sources

> Manage persistence between requests and the life of an individual  request from browser to server to browser

> Tap System i DB2 database tables from PHP

> Install and access MySQL databases on the System i

Jeff Olen is the owner and founder of Olen Business Consulting Inc. and has developed PHP applications on the System i for a wide variety of clients. In addition to extensive development experience with RPG, he has also developed applications using C, C++, Javascript, HTML, PHP and MySQL. He lives in Orange, California. Kevin Schroeder is a technical consultant for Zend Technologies and has developed production software using a wide variety of languages including PHP, Java, Javascript, HTML, SQL, Perl, Visual Basic, ASP, and C. He lives in Frisco, Texas.