System iNetwork

I am impressed with BCD's early entry into the PHP marketplace. But I'd like to know more about BCD's "specific features to support PHP development on the System i." I mean, how specific can they be? SQL is the standard DB API for PHP. I caution developers against using an API that is "limited" (another word for specific) to the iSeries.

One reason for this caution is that you'd then always have to develop and test against DB2/400.
I also wonder how BCD's development environment stacks up against the dozens of other PHP IDEs. Because, aside from the iSeries-specific APIs, it seems to me that they'll be competing against all PHP environments.

Certainly, from what I've experienced with BCD's tools in the past, BCD's developers can be stacked up against any systems programmers. System iNetwork will have to publish a product review.

Don,

The System i specific features we have provided include tight DB2 UDB database integration, meaning that when you are working in the IDE you get to see field descriptions of your files (or tables) and you get to drag and drop those on the HTML or code editor. This is a major advantage over other PHP IDEs. We also include functions to handle library lists for development and production libraries to assist in ALM issues, and functions for easier connectivity to the database.

We've also provided tons of templates that allow developers to build working PHP apps with no initial programming required, although you can subsequently modify the code. We support DB2 SQL, DB2 record level access as well as MySQL. While it's true that the DB2 SQL is specific to the System i, we see this as a great advantage for existing System i developers. WebSmart PHP also has the same tight integration with MySQL, so we can leverage using that database on the System i or other platforms too. So I think in many ways this gives developers the best of both worlds.

We will be competing against other PHP environments, but most of those are code editors. We have built-in change management, Visual HTML editing, template-driven programming and design and central repository (like data modelling) features that I think set us apart from most of those editors.

Thanks for your kind words about our developers!

Why have an advanced computer like the iSeries if you're not going to use its advanced features? That'd be like Windows people saying, "Program in .NET but don't use anything specific to Windows. Better yet, just program in PHP so it runs on whatever our OS of choice is next year. Oh, and don't use anything specific to SQL Server. Don't want to get tied down to a platform."

I can hear the hysterical laughter now.

As for SOA, I'm sure ABL has implemented a fine interface to the iSeries for SOA; they have a proven track record (as does BCD) of doing that. But the concept of SOA is a solution looking for a problem it can fill, and there aren't many.

Early touts were internet nirvana services, seeking each other out and locking in like lovebugs, but the stuff that ended up making the press was companies with mainframes citing some success in making business transactions available to other in house systems.

Nothing wrong with that, but it's not exactly new, just a more verbose universal interface to remote calling methodologies like CORBA.

So let's talk about SOA over the internet using that verbose universal interface. It implies a site that wants to serve you, a business relationship that requires authentication and security, and transactions that can be processed in a reasonable time.

Examples given are often something like inventory on hand available for your company to order and the like.

Anyone care to consider a real world example of this? Try online. Bringing up a page and having your site sending these SOA calls off to populate the page before sending to you. A list of items, a list of calls, right. . . .

Well, let's consider batch processing. Inventory restocking process goes through inventory and identifies items that may need ordered. Another thread runs through the list and updates potential order quantities on hand for some later process that will use it. I don't know, whatever happened to ordering and getting back a status?

SOA makes noises like it's as easy as calling a procedure, but there can only be a range of non-critical uses for it, and even doing that will slow down whatever non-critical process is using it, making it both non-critical and slow.

Lots of noise about SOA for quite some time now, and I finally starting seeing some of the hype veneer wear off to get realistic assessments of, "This is really hard to get right."

What's even harder is finding that non-critical, acceptably slow use for it.

To development tools, there doesn't seem to be any doubt that Zend i5/OS PHP and BCD's PHP flavor are going to be it for awhile. I still think that anyone who thinks PHP is more straightforward than ILE RPG hasn't seen PHP.

I wonder what all those PHP programmers that have nothing else between PHP and Java would do if everyone had an iSeries and ILE RPG.

They'd use it, same as we do.

rd