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.

The Zend Developer Zone has a new article posted looking to help you squeeze the most performance you can out of the Zend Platform application from Zend on your IBM i machine.

Zend Platform on IBM I provides many benefits including monitoring and advanced debugging. One of the more confusing issues that customers face with Zend Platform on IBM i is the impact on development machines. Most will try out Zend Platform in a development environment or on a development LPAR.

There's three things they suggest to tweak to help you get the most out of Platform - code acceleration, dynamic content caching and code compression.

PHP is always thought of as an open source free spirit that survives on the work that's done by the community around it. While there's no denying the massive amounts of work done by developers of the language, there's also another group that is doing their part to help the language flourish - commercial entities. Scott MacVicar takes a look at a few of them in this new post to his blog.

I thought I'd start with a quick thank you to all those groups and entities involved indirectly with PHP. The PHP project relies on donations to provide our service infrastructure, this is in the form of hardware and hosting from both individual companies and hosting companies to provide collocation.

Besides the hardware support there's also companies willing to allow their employees time to work on the project (such as Pierre from Microsoft). Other companies that have made large contributions include IBM's large amount of testing, Sun's work to improve PHP on Solaris and, of course, Zend's support of the project and the time its employees spend developing the language.

Andi Gutmans has posted about a new feature that will be included in any new (or upgraded) IBM i system - a full "Zend web stack" of their products and services.

The relationship with the IBM i team started in 2005. I was deeply involved in forming the partnership and at the time did a lot of the research to better understand the opportunity. [...] There were several solutions at the time which enabled IBM i customers to Web-enable their applications. However, PHP was of biggest interest to the community for many reasons.

PHP was a good fit because of the large pool of PHP developers already on hand, its cross-platform nature, low entry (learning) level and that it provides easy access (through frameworks and the like) to more advanced web technologies.

I am very much looking forward to continuing our close collaboration with the team at IBM who had the foresight of really pushing this hard over the past few years and, with that, not only making PHP on the IBM i a reality but a first-class citizen.

In a new post to her blog Zoe Slattery points out a big step in PHP's presence in systems all around the world - the inclusion of it into the CISC systems.

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.