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.