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.

The Zend Developer Zone has shared a few links to some upcoming webcasts from Zend - three to be exact.

Zend has a series of free webinars on various PHP topics that is constantly ongoing. There are three of these webinars coming up on the schedule this April, and you do need to go and register for them ahead of time.

• WEBINAR: Set up a complete PHP environment in minutes!
• EBINAR: Advanced Management for PHP for i5
• WEBINAR - How to increase application performance using caching

The post has descriptions of each as well.

As the Zend Developer Zone points out, there's a new article from Erwin Early (of the i5 community) that's a shot introduction to what the Zend Framework is and some of what it entails.

The customer interest in PHP has been high and I receive numerous questions at customer events on its usage of PHP on IBM i. Many people also ask about Zend Framework. What is Zend Framework? Can I use it on i5/OS? How can I integrate the advanced functionality that Zend Framework provides?

To answer some of these questions he gives an overview of the framework - some of the components that make it up, how to place it so that Zend Core can find it, some resources about the framework and an example os its use to make a PDF with Zend_Pdf.