The IBM i Programmer's Guide to PHP

This is the first book to comprehensively address PHP and how it can-and should-be deployed on the IBM i. With this IBM i-specific point of view, the authors examine how to transfer skills from a green screen environment to the Web, become intimately familiar with PHP€s commonly used features, and help start down the road of highly interactive Web-based application development.

For decades, the green screen has been the ubiquitous interface into an organization€s data. But with the advent of HTML, the Internet, and the browser, combined with the end user€s existing familiarity with the Web, green-screen developers are seeing much of the demand for their skills diminish in favor of more Web-enabled technologies. One of those technologies is the PHP programming language.

A flexible, forgiving programming style makes PHP easier to learn, and is just one of the many reasons PHP tops the list when developers seek to improve their Web-related skills. While not limited to Web development, PHP is designed from the ground up to be the ideal environment to easily build simple or complex Web-based applications in the most effective manner possible, while still giving programmers the control they need.

With this book you will learn to:

> Build basic PHP applications and how to structure them

> Access local and remote resources, as well as external data sources

> Manage persistence between requests and the life of an individual  request from browser to server to browser

> Tap System i DB2 database tables from PHP

> Install and access MySQL databases on the System i