If you've ever worked with WebSphere and tried to integrate it with PHP, you know the frustration Daniel Crook has faced. Thankfully, he's found the answer to this marging of technology and shares it here on his blog.

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.

If you've ever worked with WebSphere and tried to integrate it with PHP, you know the frustration Daniel Crook has faced. Thankfully, he's found the answer to this marging of technology and shares it here on his blog.

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.

For anyone that's using or wanted to use Smarty in the future and has been looking into the Zend Framework, you might have hesitated until you know how to tie them both together. Well, wait no more! This new post from the Zend Developer Zone shows you exactly how.

Inspired by this article I started to play around a bit to integrate the Smarty template engine into the Zend Framework. My ambition was to minimize the required code in the controller actions but stay close to the given Zend_View API. I also wanted to integrate the Smarty caching feature. Here is the code I came up with.

He sets up a directory under his Zend library include path for the templates to live in and starts writing code. The first step is a class that's based off the Zend_View_Abstract class to set the initial Smarty variables. He follows this up with serveral methods - __run, assign, and escape before displaying the results with output().

Finally, he gives an example of how to use the class he's created to spit out a Smarty template with all of the data nicely in place.

More information on the Zend Framework can be found at framework.zend.com, and information on Smarty at smarty.php.net

For anyone that's using or wanted to use Smarty in the future and has been looking into the Zend Framework, you might have hesitated until you know how to tie them both together. Well, wait no more! This new post from the Zend Developer Zone shows you exactly how.

Inspired by this article I started to play around a bit to integrate the Smarty template engine into the Zend Framework. My ambition was to minimize the required code in the controller actions but stay close to the given Zend_View API. I also wanted to integrate the Smarty caching feature. Here is the code I came up with.

He sets up a directory under his Zend library include path for the templates to live in and starts writing code. The first step is a class that's based off the Zend_View_Abstract class to set the initial Smarty variables. He follows this up with serveral methods - __run, assign, and escape before displaying the results with output().

Finally, he gives an example of how to use the class he's created to spit out a Smarty template with all of the data nicely in place.

More information on the Zend Framework can be found at framework.zend.com, and information on Smarty at smarty.php.net