Workshop: PHP for IBM i
Presenter: Mike Pavlak, Solutions Consultant, Zend Technologies

Please download the PDF Installing Zend Studio for the PHP Deep Dive to prepare for this session.

This is a four-hour Deep Dive where the students bring their own laptop computers and connect to an IBM i LPAR running PHP in the cloud.   The workshop includes presentations with corresponding lab sections covering the basics of PHP through RPG program calls and database access using DB2 and MySQL. Students will gain an understanding of how the popular PHP programming language works with IBM i, and will leave the workshop with a trial version of the Zend Studio integrated development environment installed on their PCs.

Mike Pavlak is a Solutions Consultant for Zend Technologies. Mike has been working with IBM midrange solutions since 1992 and IBM mainframes before that. He formerly managed IT development and operations for Tripp Lite. Mike, who lives in suburban Chicago, has been very involved with user groups and COMMON. He has developed applications using RPG, CL and PHP, and he can show you how to extend your RPG skills with PHP and the web.

Seminar: Modernizing Data Access

Dan Cruikshank, Sr. Consultant DB2 for i Optimization and Reengineering, IBM

Solving business problems using database capabilities is the cornerstone of Data Centric Development. This is accomplished by separating the business logic from the high level application programs through the use of SQL to both define and access data. There is no better way to achieve this then by utilizing IBM’s most advanced relational database management system running on Power architecture: DB2 for i.

In this session we will start with an overview of the IBM multi-phased approach to data access modernization. This will include the technique for transparently migrating DDS to DDL using the “measure twice, cut once approach.”

We will follow that with techniques for building a virtual data access layer using SQL Views which mask the complexity of the database and allow future changes with minimal impact to production applications. Speaking of applications, we will cover the concepts of utilizing Stored Procedures (SQL and External) to build shared IO modules which are the primary access to the database. Finally, no data centric database can truly be called complete if it is not taking advantage of database constraints. We will conclude with an overview of data integrity constraints such as Primary, Foreign, Unique, and Check.