IBM developerWorks: Java and PHP technology on AIX - Integrate the Java business application w/ DB2
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On the IBM developerWorks site, the next part of their tutorial series looking at working with AIX and PHP has been posted. This time, there's a focus on integrating a Java business application in using DB2 (version 9) as the backend.   It is possible to develop applications that employ both Java and PHP technology on AIX. You can use the Java programming language for the core logic (or redeploy an existing Java-based application), while gaining the benefits of PHP as a Web-based interface platform. In this article, the third of the series, find out how to connect the core application created in the second installment to a DB2 database for the storage of the survey questions and responses.   They talk some about database roles before working through the DB2 database installation. Then it's time to make the connection to the application, create the table structures and insert information.
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Lukas Smith has posted his review of a book from Packt Publishing - "PHP Web 2.0 Mashup Projects: Practical PHP Mashups with Google Maps, Flickr, Amazon, YouTube, MSN Search, Yahoo!"   Duane from Pakt asked me if I would be interested in reviewing a few books for them in my blog. I picked "Mashup Projects" from the list of just released books, since I am interesting in the topic and I am actually going to give a presentation at the internal "PHP Day" we are doing at Optaros in November.   He points out the good (good writing style, well-chosen examples) and the bad (a log list of errors and oversights in the code). He also talks about the contents of the book - the different examples and the final more major project. Overall though, he sees it as a good book, one that would be a good introduction to mashups for PHP developers (if you look past the formatting issues).
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Students at North Carolina State University are learning to build business applications in the Web 2.0 mold using&#160;an IBM incubator project called Project Zero.Announced last year, Project Zero is a programming framework for rapidly building Web applications. Its pieces include a scripting runtime for Groovy and PHP (hypertext preprocessor), two hot dynamic languages, along with APIs (application programming interfaces) for creating REST (representational state transfer) Web services, user interfaces, and mashups, according to IBM. It is available as a plug-in for the Eclipse integrated development environment, as well as in a version for developers who prefer to work from the command line.However, the project has faced some criticism, because although its community-driven model echoes open source, it is not an open-source project. Mark Hanny, vice president of strategic partnerships at IBM, said a commercial version of Project Zero could surface soon.James Governor, an analyst with Redmonk, suggested it makes sense for IBM to embrace newer development methods in its work with schools.&quot;IBM doesn&#39;t want to be your father&#39;s IBM, it wants to be your son&#39;s,&quot; he said.There is significant demand in the job market for such skills, according to IBM. Citing statistics from Skillproof, a research firm in Connecticut, IBM said the number of U.S. job openings for IT professionals grew 45.2 percent between 2004 and the end of last year. Knowledge of open standards and Web 2.0 development skills were in particularly high demand, according to IBM.NCSU Professor Munindar Singh said Project Zero&#39;s rapid development framework has helped students focus on higher-level issues around application development, rather than trudge at length through the deep weeds.His students generally enter the courses having learned some Java, created Web pages and done some scripting, but usually lack experience at the plumbing level, the professor said.&quot;Spending a lot of time just trying to configure an application server to do stuff for them is such a waste of time,&quot; he said. &quot;That&#39;s something the tool should be doing for them. ... The higher up they are in the food chain, the more creative they&#39;re going to be.&quot;According to Hanny, the IT world&#39;s needs are changing.&quot;Professors are spending a lot more time helping people at a higher level to be the architect, to be the project managers,&quot; he said. &quot;These are the jobs that are in great demand.&quot;&quot;IT is much broader. It&#39;s pervasive,&quot; he added. &quot;Some of the training is not even going on in computer science; some of it is going on in business schools.&quot;Meanwhile, IBM and the University of California-Los Angeles previously created a program within one computer science course that sees students choose their own Web 2.0 project and then work with IBM mentors to complete it.Jeffrey Tan, a UCLA senior from Palo Alto, California, built a mashup called Bounce along with two classmates. It leveraged the Facebook API along with listings from the Eventful event aggregator and maps from Google Maps. Tan&#39;s contributions focused on the application&#39;s front end.IBM officials served more as sounding boards than as direct teachers, he said. For example, the students would write a specification document for a Web site and send it to technical staffers at IBM, who would provide advice and feedback, such as what APIs to use, he said.Tan hopes to find a career building Web sites and &quot;managing back-end, server-side stuff.&quot;&quot;I just interviewed for a job, and almost all I talked about are these major Web 2.0 technologies,&quot; he said. &quot;Basically, Web 2.0 is replacing the old Web.&quot;&#160;
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Michael Kimsal has come up with the start of a series to introduce PHP developers to the world of Grails (the Java framework).   The comparisons I plan to make will be mostly to PHP, cause that's what I'm most familiar with, though there may be some other comparisons from time to time.  This is a work in progress, but I'd be very interested in feedback from anyone out there interested in this aea - Grails, Groovy, PHP, why another language/platform/framework, etc.   The first two installments have been posted - part one and part two - with an introduction to what Grails is and a brief dip into some "Hello world" sort of code to give you an idea of the structure.
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Beehive Code Now Available in Apache; XMLBeans Officially Approved as Apache Project
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MySQL developers turn to an unlikely source for database tool: Microsoft. Also: SGI visualizes Linux, and the return of Java veteran Kim Polese.
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Mike Willbanks has posted an introduction he's written up giving some helpful hints at tuning your servers and PHP applications for performance.   The focus of this post is not to show performance related items to specific PHP frameworks since many bottlenecks actually apply before running the framework itself that should certainly be solved up front. Therefore in this posting I attempt to look at simple items that can be deployed in order to produce finer tuned systems.  He talks about a few different aspects:  PHP Performance Tuning (opcode caching, apc file priming, includes, loops, etc) RDBMS Performance Tuning (indexes in queries, query caching, archiving) HTTP Performance Tuning (content compression, css sprites, limit modules, etc)
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On the Zend Developer Zone, Cal Evans has posted a quick look at one of the new offerings from the Manning Publishing group - "PHP in Action".   My buddy Olivia over at Manning Publications sent us a present recently. They are working on the title PHP in Action and they sent us a chapter to share with you. PHP in Action is scheduled to release in April of this year but it's available now in "Manning Early Release Program", or MEAP. MEAP is a cool program that allows you to buy the book long before it is released and have access to the chapters as they are released. Then, when the final dead-tree edition ships, they will send you one. The great thing is, there is no additional cost for MEAP.   He links to the book's description on the Manning site and gives some credit to the authors, Dagfinn Reiersol with Marcus Baker and Chris Shiflett. And, of course, the link to the sample chapter from the book - a look at Design Patterns.
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From ITJungle.com today, there's a new article that talks to Zend about their effort to get PHP pushed to the System i platform via the Zend Core and the progress it's making.   The push to create a new generation of young PHP programmers and PHP-driven Web applications on the IBM System i is moving forward according to plan, according to Zend Technology, the company commercializing the open source scripting language and providing support and training services. "Things are going phenomenally well," Zend business development vice president Mike Pinette says, giving evidence of that early success. "We're firing on all cylinders."   They go on to talk about other offerings Zend is making available for the platform including their popular Zend Platform package. There's talk of how Zend's effort is spreading (across countries) and their additional focus on the "bread and butter" shops - "manufacturers, distributors, retail chains, banks, and financial institutions that have heavily invested in OS/400 and RPG over the years".
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Cal Evans is attending this year's php/db|works conference up in Toronto and has reported back with his summary of the first day of the conference - "Tutorial Day".   Day One at php|works was dedicated to tutorials. Paul Reinheimer did a 6 hour crash course for those who wanted to take the Zend Certification Test here at the conference. I talked with a three attendees at the Crash Course to get their opinion on how it was going. Cairan Walsh, who is not currently Zend Certified found the course interested although he thought maybe it was a bit too basic.   Cal notes that just about everyone that attended the "Crash Course" was pleased with the contents/teacher/etc. He also mentions his visits to the "Advanced XML and Web Services" and "Extending PHP" tutorials.
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An Eclipse IDE plug-in that would provide search capabilities specifically for developers is being readied by a University of California, Berkeley computer science professor.ADVERTISEMENTSBC Case Study: Crate & BarrelWhat sold them on improving their network? A system that could cut management costs from the get-go. Find out more.
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Aaron Wormus has a new note on his blog today about his presentation at this year's Zend/PHP Conference & Expo and another speaker he's excited to hear.    One of the Zend conference sessions that I'm pretty excited about is Don Samisa Abeysinghe's (of WSO2) "Fully Fletched Web Services with PHP".   I'll be presenting a session on "Moving to PHP5 with Style." This tutorial/case study will be based on experience in transitioning several codebases from PHP4 to PHP5, creating unit tests & started a move towards a service based architecture without a complete platform rewrite.    Aaron's talk fits under the banner of the "PHP Development" talks, including others on topics like hosting PHP applications on Windows, working with PDO, unicoding in PHP6, and using PHPUnit.
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The Zend Developer Zone has posted the latest episode of their PHP Abstract podcast hosted by Rob Richards and covering service oriented architectures in PHP.   Our special guest today is Rob Richards. Rob is an author and maintainer of many of the XML-based extensions of PHP 5, as well as one of the maintainers of libxml2. He is also the author of Pro PHP and Web Services, published by Apress. Rob is going to give us an overview of Service Oriented Architecture and what it means to us as PHP developers.   The direct link to grab the show is here, but you'd be doing yourself a favor to subscribe to the podcast feed and get all of the great content on a wide variety of topics presented by the experts.
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In a new post to his blog today, Stuart Herbert continues the theme he started in a previous post about a business case for PHP. In this new entry, he shares some things he's done to further the effort.   To turn this from an idea into reality, I've setup a Google group where anyone who is interested can join in, and help build this resource. Please come along with your ideas and concerns, and let's see what we can achieve together.   He also suggests some "first steps" to get the ball rolling, namely a list of topics the business case needs to cover.
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Partners who use IBM's WebSphere Application Server Community Edition or the vendor's DB2 Express-C database will be able to directly tap IBM staff for advice on integration, scalability, testing and support issues and won't have to pay for the privilege.
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Sleepycat Software this week announced the general availability of Berkeley DB XML 2.0, a major upgrade to its open source database for telecommunication infrastructure and enterprise data centers. This release adds support for XQuery 1.0, an emerging standard for XML data access, as well as improvements in performance and usability. Other enhancements include support for XPath 2.0, which allows the selection of a portion of an XML document, and support for the PHP API, which enables developers using the PHP scripting languages to work with XML documents.  ADVERTISEMENTSolaris 10(TM) OS: Position your business ten moves ahead.Solaris 10 OS has arrived and provides even more reasons for the world's most demanding businesses to operate on this, the leading UNIX platform. Like the fact you can run Linux and Solaris applications side-by-side and run the same OS on SPARC(R), AMD Opteron(TM), and Intel processor-based systems. Discover more reasons and how Solaris 10 OS can move your business ahead today.
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This is a followup on Marco Tablini's discussion of the PHP programmer availablity and my earlier attempt at defining enterprise PHP.