You'll want to get PHP from
http://www.zend.com/products/zend_core/zend_core_for_i5_os (you can get more than just the runtime from them and this is the supported version). Your understanding of what PHP is is correct. You are also correct in that there is a lot of trendyness for web tools. Java has several plusses (like lots of different tools available for various things) but the learning curve is very, very steep and then on top of it, you also have to learn stuff about the application server (WebSphere is one, Tomcat is another).
I haven't done much with PHP but it is easy to pick up on, it's cross platform (which is nice since you can mess with it locally but be aware that the version you can get from Zend has i5/OS specific parts), and there's lots of community support.
Matt
-----Original Message-----
From: web400-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxx [mailto:web400-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of Pat Barber
Sent: Friday, November 16, 2007 1:31 PM
To: Web Enabling the AS400 / iSeries
Subject: Re: [WEB400] Books
The biggest problem I have come across are all the new terms for the tools.
PHP is proabably a tool but I have no idea.
(before hitting enter... I did a search...)
http://www.php.net/
It would appear that php is a language of some sort.(open source)
that is stuffed into html. It is not clear from that web site who you
might call if your PHP breaks. I doubt anybody could actually be
called. It would appear to be code developed in Europe.
A lot of the web stuff seems to be what ever is "trendy" at the moment.
I don't see any tool development aids mentioned over and over again.
It seems that everybody(even this list) have a different slant on "which
way to go",
which tells me that there are several ways to go.
I recall IBM pushing Java as the next coming, but I see a lot of
conversation
that says exactly the opposite. It's really tough to sort through all this.
Like I said earlier, I got a LOT of reading to do.
Haas, Matt (CL Tech Sv) wrote:
Pat,
WebSphere is just another tool for delivering dynamic web content. You can certainly use CGI which has a much smaller learning curve than Java but PHP is also a supported option now (on V5R3 and newer systems) and there are a lot of 3rd party tools for web development. Also, IBM is supporting CGIDEV2 (which competes with Brad's tooling and I think Bob Cozzi also has something similar). Net.Data is also an option but I would choose PHP over it if I were starting from scratch today.
Before you start using these tools, it would be well worth the effort to learn about how HTTP works (this also helps with setting up HTTP servers which is why Professional Apache 2.0 covers this topic) and write a few simple web programs that don't use any of the available frameworks just to get a good understanding of what's going on. It's also a good idea to get an understanding of how CGI works since all of the communication between a web app and the HTTP server works basically the same way. BTW, HTTP and CGI are pretty straight forward and as long as you don't dive too deep into them (at least when you are starting out) shouldn't take much time to get up to speed with.
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