As Mark Even at IBM System Lab Services eminently put it:
“Sooner or later, you need to bite the bullet and modernise. If you want to keep the application and the value it gives, you’ve got to modernise it”.
Organisations are facing increased costs for the maintenance of legacy applications, having to train end-users unfamiliar with green screens and a competitive market for RPG programmers – all of which are making the need for IBM i modernisation imperative.
If your organisation is thinking of developing an IBM i modernisation strategy, then you will need to choose which technologies and tools are best for your organisation. You’ll need to ensure that they are easily learnt by your RPG programmers, that they deliver quick results (with immediate ROI) and are future proof – mobile immediately springs to mind now, but what will come next?
PHP gives you all of this and more.
BCD Software, now Fresche Solutions, and Zend are hosting a webinar on Tuesday 24 February 2015 from 6 pm to 7 pm GMT examining why PHP needs to be part of your IBM i modernisation strategy.
The webinar is in two parts.
Zend solution consultant, former IT Director and leading technical expert on PHP on the IBM i, Mike Pavlak will be hosting the first part of the webinar and will focus on, not surprisingly PHP and Zend:
- Why PHP is a great application modernisation choice for organisations running IBM i
- Why PHP is easy for RPG programmers to learn
- How to get started with PHP on IBM i
- How Zend Server reduces the application development life cycle.
For those unfamiliar with Zend, they are the leading provider of an enterprise-grade application platform for PHP: Zend Server. Zend Server runs natively on the IBM i (and is available as a simple and free download for IBM i).
- Simple connectivity to DB2 for IBM i
- Easy for RPG and Cobol programmers to learn: start procedural, gradually phase in object-oriented frameworks
- Free IBM i toolkit to help you with PHP enablement
- Free download comes with one year of Silver Support
- Free access to Zend Studio, an integrated developer environment (IDE) for PHP
- Simplified debugging and performance tuning with Z-Ray
- Tap into the community of over 5 million PHP developers
- Leverage the experience of IBM i users like Prada, DHL, and Starbucks.
BCD Software’s VP of Marketing, Marcel Sarrasin will be hosting the second half of the webinar. He’ll be showing you how you can create a working desktop or mobile web application in under an hour with WebSmart PHP.
WebSmart from BCD Software comes in two versions, with WebSmart PHP the focus of this particular webinar. WebSmart PHP is used for creating open-source PHP applications that run on multiple platforms, including IBM i, Microsoft Windows, Linux or Unix accessing databases such as DB2, MySQL and Oracle. WebSmart PHP applications run with Zend Server if hosting on IBM i.
There are a number of WebSmart case studies on this blog. You can have a read of them by following the links below:
Posted by Paul on 11th February 2015.