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.

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.

The IBM developerWorks site has this new tutorial posted showing how to combine two different languages, PHP and Jave, with the help of the Java bridge in the WebSphere sMash environment.

The WebSphere sMash environment enables rapid development of interactive Web applications based on popular Web technologies such as PHP, and it lets you reuse existing Java assets from PHP scripts. This article introduces the Java Bridge and shows how to access Java classes from PHP.

They create a sample project to work with in sMash and show how to implement and create a new the Java object that automatically loads and makes available to PHP the functionality inside. They look at accessing static methods and fields, catching exceptions, type conversion, and working with SQL connections.