ZendCon 2016: Accelerate Great PHP is coming up once again at the Hard Rock Hotel and Casino, Las Vegas with a full conference line-up, including a number of sessions that will be of great interest to the IBM i developer.
ZendCon 2016’s theme is ‘Accelerate Great PHP’ and the conference is set to be an eye-opening three days, from the 18th to the 21st of October 2016. Globally, there are over 5 million active developers driving more than 250 million PHP applications: the ZendCon organisers have been able to take their pick of the very best experts, thought leaders and decision-makers, to deliver training and networking opportunities, and increase your PHP knowledge.
This will be the 12th year of ZendCon. With in-depth technical tutorials, authoritative keynote sessions and exhibit hall activities, as well as informal opportunities to highlight and discuss innovations in web-related open source technologies, including the best in enterprise PHP development and the latest for PHP7.
As well as a pre-conference tutorials day on October 18th, attendees will be brought up to speed on all things PHP and IBM i with six tracks covering:
- PHP best practices
- PHP frameworks
- PHP communities
- IBM i development
- DevOps and continuous delivery
- Open source ecosystems
Unfortunately, we can’t make the conference this year, but we’ve chosen our pick of the most useful sessions from each day, for PHP on IBM i developers:
PHP certification bootcamp, parts I and II
Christian Wenz, 18th October 2016, 09:00-12:00 and 13:00-16:00
Christian Wenz, is one of the authors of the Zend PHP Certification, the industry standard to test developers’ knowledge of PHP. This two-part workshop, part of the pre-conference Tutorials Day, covers the topic areas and background information of the test, including sample questions to test your PHP knowledge.
Intro to PHP on the IBM i, workshops I and II
Mike Pavlak, 18th October 2016, 09:00-12:00 and 13:00-16:00
The other great full-day workshop presented on tutorials day comes from IBM i expert, Mike Pavlak. This is a hands-on session, with access to IBM i LPAR running PHP in the cloud, and the opportunity to take part on four lab sessions covering the fundamentals of PHP, including variable use, arrays, function declarations and calls, and more. By exploring the new open-source toolkit for calling CL Commands and RPG programs, accessing databases using DB2 and MySQL, and exploring the object-oriented model of PHP, anyone attending this session will learn huge amounts about IBM i.
30 PHP tips on IBM i in 60 minutes
Mike Pavlak, 19th October 2016, 11:30-12:30
The brilliant Mike Pavlak once again features on our list of must-see sessions at ZendCon 2016, giving us his 30 top tips on performance, security and best practise for developers writing PHP on the IBM i. Everyone, from the most experienced developer to the beginner stands to learn something new about PHP on the IBM i from Mike.
PHP installed on IBM i: The nickel tour
Rod Flohr, 19th October 2016, 17:15-18:15
Speaking in the last session on the first full day of the conference, RPG programmer Rod Flohr’s teaches PHP developers and administrators exactly how PHP fits into the IBM i operating system, including:
- Looking inside the IFS directories added by the Zend Server installer
- Seeing where Apache and FastCGI configurations, PHP and PHP extensions, and log files are kept
- Discussing how existing prerequisite software and new file objects interact on the IBM i to present dynamic pages to the web.
James Titcomb, 20th October 2016, 11:30-12:30
Hailing from our side of the pond, James founded and runs the PHP Hampshire user-group. In this session, he explains some of the complexities of developing PHP for the IBM i platform, on Zend Server, including database abstraction, unit tests, functional tests, continuous integration, automated deployment, and more.
Zend framework 2 and 3 for the IBM i
Stephanie Rabbani, 20th October 2016, 16:00-17:00
Stephanie, of iQ Web Development, is an expert in using PHP to develop web applications on IBM i, and is a consultant on the ongoing development of the PHP Toolkit for IBM i. This session looks at the benefits of using Zend framework for developing web applications in PHP on the IBM i, and how to set up, configure and use Zend on the IBM i for database access, as well as introducing the service manager and the events manager for Zend framework, and exploring the crucial differences between Zend Frameworks 2 and 3.
Application development for IBM i detabase server with PHP 7
Shlomo Vanunu, 21st October 2016, 09:15-10:15
Covering the enterpsise ibm_db2 SQL extension for PHP 7, this session covers a range of PHP 7 functions and topics, like functions for connecting to a database, operations including update/insert/delete, and setting up the DB2 for IBM i commitment contol.
Zend framework 2 and 3 for the IBM i
Stephanie Rabbani, 20th October 2016, 16:00-17:00
Stephanie, of iQ Web Development, is an expert in using PHP to develop web applications on IBM i, and is a consultant on the ongoing development of the PHP Toolkit for IBM i. This session looks at the benefits of using Zend framework for developing web applications in PHP on the IBM i, and how to set up, configure and use Zend on the IBM i for database access, as well as introducing the service manager and the events manager for Zend framework, and exploring the crucial differences between Zend Frameworks 2 and 3.
As a partner for Zend, we’re looking forward to hearing all the PHP and IBM i news from ZendCon. Get in touchto speak to us about your PHP on IBM i applications on your Zend server.
Posted by Paul on 10th October 2016.