On PHPMaster.com today they've posted the second part of their "PHP and the i" series (here's part one). In this new article, he looks a bit closer at what kind of knowledge is needed to develop PHP on the IBM i.

In this somewhat risqué episode, we'll look at just what you need to be able to do development work on the i. Many people in the i world will that PHP is native to the i, but I don't think that's really true. To me, native means that it just runs, no problems or questions asked, nothing special needs to be done, it just sort of happens like when you see someone across a crowded room and know she/he is "the one". That's not the way it works with PHP and the i.

He starts off by talking about Zend and its contribution to the IBM i's abilities to run PHP through RPG thanks to a "bridge" they created. There are other options, but as he points out, they're not as well developed (or supported) as Zend's offering (being Zend Server, Zend Studio and Zend Framework).

He then talks about the details of creating and running scripts - where to put them, what kind of RPG knowledge you'll need to implement them, and which parts of the typical MVC stack work best where.