In today's dynamic Web environment, developers want to build Web applications quickly, re-use and combine them simply, and adopt an agile approach to development. IBM's WebSphere sMash (aka Project Zero) is a complete platform for developing, assembling and executing agile Web 2.0 applications. In this talk I'll demonstrate how PHP developers can use WebSphere sMash, with its focus on speed, simplicity and agility, to develop and deploy leading edge Web 2.0 applications.

You can listen in two ways - either via the in-page player or by downloading the mp3 directly.

You probably don't realise it but it's very likely that sometime during the last week you will have have used IBM's CICS technology. [...] Last week PHP made it into CICS, PHP is now being used to build agile front ends and RESTful interfaces for the technology that underpins most of the world's large scale commercial systems. You don't get much more into The Enterprise than that!

IBM made the announcement back on Friday the 12th about the upgrade to the sMash WebSphere software. The update, a SupportPac lets developers run PHP inside of a CICS transaction and can be used to create REST services other applications/interfaces can use to directly communicate with the CICS system.

The WebSphere sMash environment enables rapid development of interactive Web applications based on popular Web technologies such as PHP, and it lets you reuse existing Java assets from PHP scripts. This article introduces the Java Bridge and shows how to access Java classes from PHP.

They create a sample project to work with in sMash and show how to implement and create a new the Java object that automatically loads and makes available to PHP the functionality inside. They look at accessing static methods and fields, catching exceptions, type conversion, and working with SQL connections.

In the time since I wrote that post [talking about PHP with WebSphere], and particularly in the past month, there have been several items published which demonstrate the value of this technology. I still need to delve deeper, but here's a quick summary of what's going on.

He looks quickly at this combination, breaking it out into four parts - what the technology is, how it allows PHP and Java to work together, where you can download the needed software from and some resources where you can find out more information on implementation and examples of it in action.

Just as you can communicate with DB2 from your PHP applications via three distinct interfaces - Unified ODBC, ibm_db2, and PDO - there are several approaches to adding PHP support to WebSphere Application Server, each with benefits and drawbacks.

As a disclaimer, I don't claim to represent IBM or provide IBM's viewpoints on this, but I'm offering this list as a general overview about what options are available as IBM continues to encourage the use of PHP in enterprise environments.

He offers four methods to getting WebSphere and PHP to play nicely together:

• Build PHP as an Apache module and connect to WAS via the Web server plugin
• Use the PHP Integration Kit to add PHP support to WebSphere Application Server Community Edition
• Use the PHP / Java Bridge
• Use an implementation of a PHP interpreter in Java

For each, there's a brief explaination as far as the steps to take to use the option and links to other resources that show in a bit more detail how to accomplish that kind of integration.