As Daniel Krook mentions in his latest blog post, the IBM developerWorks site has just posted the last part of a series he's been writing about migrating a PHP application's backend over to DB2.

IBM developerWorks has just published the final part in our series on migrating a PHP application from MySQL to DB2. [...] In addition to sharing our own experience, the series highlights the number of resources available to you to carry out your own migration.

The series is broken up into four parts:

• Prepare for your migration
• Migrate your data
• Convert your PHP code
• Deploy your application

On the IBM developerWorks site today there's a new tutorial from Daniel Krook showing you how to use the IBM Cloud product to set up a development environment based on a Red Hat Enterprise server distribution with Zend Server as the PHP environment.

This article explains what makes cloud computing appealing to PHP developers and provides step-by-step instructions how to use the IBM Cloud to set up a PHP and DB2 development environment quickly. Learn how to provision Linux data and web application servers, connect to the virtual machines via SSH, use X Forwarding to install a pre-configured PHP distribution, and test your connection to DB2.

He starts with some benefits that the IBM Cloud can bring to developers and lists a few common goals that they look for in their development platforms. The rest of the post walks you through the setup and install of a sample instance - adding and configuring it, connecting via an SSH connection and installing Zend Server to give you a simple, hassle-free installation of a PHP environment.

On the Zend Developer Zone there's a recent post of an interview with Mike Pavlak, a Solutions Consultant and IBM Series i expert, as interviewed in a podcast by Kevin Schroeder of Zend.

In this podcast Mike talks a little bit about where he's come from, the history of PHP on the i and, what I think is most interesting, what it is that PHP developers can learn from the "old-school" RPG developers and vice versa.

Mike also talks about one of his favorite parts of his job - being able to go out and give talks and just being out in the communities (user groups, conferences, etc). You can listen to this interview via the in-page player for the post.

The IBM developerWorks site has posted a very high-level overview of one of the most popular PHP frameworks currently in use the Zend Framework. This is part one of their introductory series looking at the framework and what it has to offer.

Technical alliances with companies such as Abobe, Microsoft, and IBM, have strengthened the support and stability of the framework, which is now used by startups and Fortune 500 companies around the world. This article gives you a high-level view of the Zend Framework, explaining its general concepts and preparing you for the rest of this "Understanding the Zend Framework" series, which goes into the details by chronicling the creation of a new online RSS/Atom feed reader. You won't do much coding here, but for the rest of the series, you should be familiar with PHP.

They introduce the framework and talk about some if its origins and how the Zend Framework found its niche to stand on and dramatically improve over the past few years. They list some of the more widely used components including the Zend_Form, Zend_Db, Zend_Filter, Zend_Search, Zend_View and Zend_Log.

This series was originally published about four years ago but they've gone through and given it a refresh. The result is this first part and eight others with the holes filled in for the latest version and features of the framework. This first part has links to the others in the series near the bottom.

Enrico Zimuel has a new post to his blog today looking at the translation of a spool file on an (IBM) i5/OS machine into a PDF file using the Zend Core for i5 from Zend.

Zend Core for i5/OS provides the i5 Toolkit for PHP, an API system to call i5 functionalities from PHP. One of the function of this API is the i5_spool that is able to manage spool files for specific i5 users. In this post I present a class to convert a spool file in PDF using the Zend_Pdf class of the Zend Framework.

He includes the quick twelve line code you'll need to get the job done. It reads in the spool file with some built-in functions and calls the "toPdf" method to export the result. There's also a few parameters you can include as a second parameter that let you define things like font size and margins.

The IBuildings techportal has release the latest episode of their podcast series from this year's Dutch PHP Conference. This time it's a talk Jonathan Lawrence gave on IBM WebSphere sMash.

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.

New on the Zend Developer Zone is a tutorial showing a "Hello World" setup, configuration and testing of the Zend Core for the IBM i5 series from start to finish.

You've successfully installed the Zend Core for i5. Now what? The process of developing PHP scripts may not be obvious to System i developers familiar with RPG and COBOL. Let's take a look at the basic steps needed to start writing PHP scripts on System i.

They look at where the parts of the application are located, the steps to take to ensure it's running correctly, setting up Zend Studio and a personal development space and creating two simple scripts - one "Hello World" and the other that makes a DB2 connection to the local instance.

On the Zend Developer Zone today Sam Hennessy has posted some information about how the IBM Power Systems can help you and your PHP application both perform better and do it for less.

If you're from the LAMP world, the concept of vertically scaling with a system like the i5 (IBM Power Systems) will be a complete revelation. If you follow the vertical scaling methodology, when it comes time to design how your application will scale, there is nothing for you to do.

With the i5 series all of the software runs locally and can be optimized for the best performance ("reduced complexity"). Virtual machines on the same physical machine make it quick and easy to create separate environments (like QA or staging). The system does a lot of the common maintenance tasks itself and could require less attention from the IT admins. You can find out more information about these machines from the IBM website.

In a new post to he blog Zoe Slattery helps developers to answer the question "will my application run on Project Zero?" (IBM's development/execution platform) She's come across a tool that can help with just that.

There is a new Project Zero application which will scan your application and tell you whether it thinks it will run on Project Zero. The way it does this is to extract information from the Project Zero PHP parser - for instance it finds out the names of functions that are declared in the application and compares them with the names of functions that are invoked.

The scanner looks through the code and, when it finds a function that's not user-declared, checks it against the Project Zero PHP functionality to make sure it will work.

The Zend Developer Zone has a new article that will interest developers still looking to make the jump from PHP4 to PHP5 (you know who you are) with Informix support. Zend Core can help.

There are many business web applications written in PHP4 that use the Informix module for data access. PHP4 is no longer supported and as a result will not be issued any more fixes or releases. Since version 5.2, the Informix module is no longer available for the PDO module. In this article I'll to describe how to compile and install the Informix module on the Zend Core 2.5 (PHP 5.2.6)

The tutorial helps you set up your environment and build/install the Informix module to be plugged into the Zend Core stack. Activation is as simple as going into the Zend Core admin tool and enabling the extension. A sample script is included to test the results.

Its also noted in the comments that there's a PDO driver for Informix that can be pulled from the PECL extension repository.