Events Abound

As a speaker in the IBM i community we are in the midst of “high” season for events.  Having just wrapped up the RPG & DB2 Summit in Dallas last week and WMCPA the week before, we came away with some strong impressions.    Great turnout at the workshops and sessions leads us to believe that folks are definitely looking to improve their applications and skills and PHP is near the top of the list.

How many using PHP?

We had a chance to meet a bunch of folks gearing up for PHP on IBM i and also some loyal Zend Server folks who are already using it.  The keynote by Ian Jarman highlighted the Help Systems survey that shows 25% of the respondents indicate using PHP for new application development on IBM i.  That is a HUGE statistic and we’re excited about it only getting bigger.  

New sessions!

I launched two new sessions at the WMCPA conference and then at SUMMIT.  The first is a session inspired by Ted Holt, senior editor at Four Hundred Guru,  called “30 PHP tips in 60 Minutes”.  This session is a collection of PHP and IBM i tips I’ve amassed over the last few years and at least one attendee walked out of it with a page full of notes on things to do when he got to the home office.  The second session, "Exploring DB2 data Access in PHP", is a deep dive on the usage of the DB2 extension in PHP.  It was inspired by a recent ZendCon attendee who was new to IBM i and has been struggling with accessing the native database.  A lot of the code samples that were used to educate that newbie have been decomposed and detailed in this session.  If you’ve been wondering how to manage the library list in SQL calls or wondered how to use the data cache in Zend Server, this is the session for you.

Coming to COMMON?

I’ll be taking these sessions and many of the updated classics on the road to events all around the country this spring and of course at COMMON in New Orleans!  Have you made plans to attend the annual Conference and Expo?  Please swing by the Zend booth(#114) if you can.  We’ll have some goodies to pass around and, of course, the Zend IBM i team will be there to answer any questions you might have.  I see many sessions on PHP and other open source topics and even a brand new session on a cute little database called Maria.