On PHPMaster.com today David Shirey is back with the third part of his series looking at using PHP on the IBM i (formerly the Series i) platform. In his previous articles he's introduced the platform and shown what knowledge you'll need to get started. In this latest post, he talks about some implementation ideas to keep in mind.

No one ever talks about how to create quality pages, what they should look like, how should they be structured, and so on. The reason for that is simple: we don't need no stinkin' instructions for that! Everyone knows how to design good screens (opps, pages). That's the easy part, right? Well, maybe not. [...] Of course, business pages are different from the pages that we may develop for a blog or website.

He goes on to talk about things like the number of "switches" (shifts in context between just using the keyboard vs using the mouse as well) and how you should "mirror the task" not the database that lives behind it. He also makes a recommendation about keeping the important things "above the fold". He notes that, unlike some of the usual sites out on the web, business applications are a bit more about usefulness and less about style.

On PHPMaster.com today they've posted the second part of their "PHP and the i" series (here's part one). In this new article, he looks a bit closer at what kind of knowledge is needed to develop PHP on the IBM i.

In this somewhat risqué episode, we'll look at just what you need to be able to do development work on the i. Many people in the i world will that PHP is native to the i, but I don't think that's really true. To me, native means that it just runs, no problems or questions asked, nothing special needs to be done, it just sort of happens like when you see someone across a crowded room and know she/he is "the one". That's not the way it works with PHP and the i.

He starts off by talking about Zend and its contribution to the IBM i's abilities to run PHP through RPG thanks to a "bridge" they created. There are other options, but as he points out, they're not as well developed (or supported) as Zend's offering (being Zend Server, Zend Studio and Zend Framework).

He then talks about the details of creating and running scripts - where to put them, what kind of RPG knowledge you'll need to implement them, and which parts of the typical MVC stack work best where.

On PHPMaster.com there's a new article that looks at running PHP on a specific environment and some of the considerations the author had to make - using PHP on IBM i.

We've talked about a lot of weird things so far on PHPMaster (well, at least I think some of them are weird), but this may take the cake. In this series I want to talk to you about PHP - and the IBM I. That's right, the IBM i, formerly known as System i and before that as the AS/400. Let's start by dispelling the myth that the i is dinosaur; it's actually a very wonderful machine, and there are lot of opportunities for brave PHP programmers who venture into this realm.

He starts off with "the truth" about the IBM i and some of the features it brings to the table - total system integration, scalability, etc. He talks some about the current GUI the system uses, functionality RPG provides, and some concepts you'll need to think about before getting into PHP on the IBM I.

In a new post to the Zend Developer Zone Jayson Maynard reminds you of some of the upcoming webinars from Zend that'll be happening this month. There's four of them in the list:

• Best Practices for Magento Development
• PHP Performance: Principles and Tools
• Zend Server for IBM i in Action
• Simpler Debugging, Better Performance: What's New in Zend Server 5.0

All events are free to attend, so if you're interested, click on the links above to get more information on the session and to sign up.

New on the Zend Developer Zone there's the latest episode of the ZendCon Sessions (as recorded at ZendCon 2009). This episode is a talk Sam Hennessey gave on scaling vertically with IBM i.

Welcome to the ZendCon 2009 edition of the ZendCon Sessions. The ZendCon Sessions are live recordings of sessions that have been given at previous Zend Conferences. Combined with the slides, they can be the next best thing to having attended the conference itself. [...] This episode of The ZendCon Sessions was recorded live at ZendCon 2009 in San Jose, CA and features Sam Hennessey giving his talk: "PHP - Faster And Cheaper. Scale Vertically with IBM i"

There's three ways to catch this latest episode - you can either listen via the in-page player, download the mp3 directly or subscribe to the ZendCon Sessions feed and get the latest episodes automatically. Be sure to check out the slides too!

The Zend Developer Zone has a new article posted looking to help you squeeze the most performance you can out of the Zend Platform application from Zend on your IBM i machine.

Zend Platform on IBM I provides many benefits including monitoring and advanced debugging. One of the more confusing issues that customers face with Zend Platform on IBM i is the impact on development machines. Most will try out Zend Platform in a development environment or on a development LPAR.

There's three things they suggest to tweak to help you get the most out of Platform - code acceleration, dynamic content caching and code compression.

Andi Gutmans has posted about a new feature that will be included in any new (or upgraded) IBM i system - a full "Zend web stack" of their products and services.

The relationship with the IBM i team started in 2005. I was deeply involved in forming the partnership and at the time did a lot of the research to better understand the opportunity. [...] There were several solutions at the time which enabled IBM i customers to Web-enable their applications. However, PHP was of biggest interest to the community for many reasons.

PHP was a good fit because of the large pool of PHP developers already on hand, its cross-platform nature, low entry (learning) level and that it provides easy access (through frameworks and the like) to more advanced web technologies.

I am very much looking forward to continuing our close collaboration with the team at IBM who had the foresight of really pushing this hard over the past few years and, with that, not only making PHP on the IBM i a reality but a first-class citizen.