BCD Tech Blog

WebSmart PHP 4.2 is now available for download at our public site or via myBCDSoftware.com. Here are the key new features:

• Validate .php files: The syntax validator has been upgraded to allow you to validate any php files in addition to your WebSmart phw files. It’s always been possible for you to edit any php files with WebSmart. The ability to validate them makes WebSmart a better general purpose php editor.

• Debugging Options Panel: The debugger, which was added in version 4.0 of WebSmart PHP, is more flexible now that you can specify an automatic launch path and query string. It is now possible to launch any path of your program when debugging it including the edit screen for a specific record, or different paths or domains to debug the same program that is running in different environments such as test or QA.

• Improved IDE UI: The WebSmart IDE has been given a facelift with a more modern look and an improved user interface.

• Improved File Browser: Manage your FTP connections and IFS files from one location. You no longer need Windows Explorer or other tools to access your IFS files when working in WebSmart.

• New WebSmart Environment Library: More easily work with multiple versions of WebSmart which you may want to do when upgrading to a new version.

• New Bundle Files: Creates a .zip file with your program definition and your entire Repository to be easily sent to BCD Technical Support to help us troubleshoot your problems faster.

Visit the WebSmart PHP New Features Page to learn more.

This is a followup to our October 19, 2011 Minimum OS/400 Release Level Notification for BCD products.

As of later this month V5R4 will be the minimum OS/400 release level supported by most BCD product releases as well as any software updates we create.

The following versions of our products are the last releases that can be installed on OS/400 V5r3:

• WebSmart ILE 9.0
• WebSmart PHP 4.0
• Clover 3.0
• Presto 3.8
• Catapult 7.71
• Nexus 4.03
• ProGen Plus 9.6
• Spool-Explorer/400 4.52
• File-Flash Plus 4.5
• DbGen 2.5
• Docu-Mint 6.6

If you have any questions or concerns please contact Technical Support.

As part of our ongoing development strategy and planning efforts here at BCD we are scheduling future internal IBM i system upgrades. This will affect the minimum OS/400 release level supported by BCD products. Our product line currently requires a minimum OS/400 release level of V5R3. As of January 1, 2012 V5R4 will be the minimum OS/400 release level supported by most BCD products and updates released after that date.

As our products continue to evolve and new products are introduced it is generally our intention to keep in step with IBM OS/400 release levels, while also giving our clients enough time to plan for this change. This allows us to develop using current technology and to make this technology available to you in our product family.

IBM discontinued support for V5R3 on April 30, 2009.

If you have any questions or concerns please contact Technical Support.

For those of you using WebSmart or Clover to access MySQL on IBM i you may have been concerned about Oracle’s announcement earlier this year that they would no longer support MySQL on IBM i. Although we believe this would have had a minimal short term impact we are very pleased by Zend Technologies’ recent announcement of a December release of an IBM i-specific version of the MySQL database that they will develop, maintain and support.

The Zend Server 5.5 for IBM i release will include Zend DBi, which has been described as a ‘drop in replacement’ for MySQL. This is good news for IBM i shops who deploy pre-packaged or already develop PHP and MySQL applications.

Since last December, when Oracle announced plans to drop support for MySQL on many operating systems including i5/OS, IBM i PHP developers have been left wondering who, if anyone, will maintain the database.  The MySQL project is open source, so developers could download and create binaries, but that’s much easier said than done!  With this announcement Zend has moved into this space with the upcoming release of Zend DBi.

Changes that Zend makes to the code base will be posted back to the MySQL open source project.  Zend has no immediate plans to make the Zend DBi project open source though.  The initial release of Zend DBi will be functionally identical to the current release of MySQL shipped with Zend Server 5.1.  Moving forward there is the potential for some divergence as the code base is maintained and features added. We’ll be keeping an eye on these developments.

WebSmart and Clover clients can now have a greater degree of confidence that the classic PHP and iAMP stack will be supported on IBM i although we may have to rename the stack iADP.

More good news is that IBM will continue to support the IBMDB2i storage engine, which enables MySQL data to be stored in DB2/400 and accessed using traditional DB2 functions. For those of you interested in IBMDB2i we’ve developed a free utility called DB2iToMySQL to help you create MYSQL tables with that engine.

If you weren’t aware that you can create web reports over MySQL with Clover Query that’s probably because we just released a new version with that feature last week. You can read more details on the Clover new features page.

Read the full Zend DBi announcement in IT Jungle >>

If you want to find out which RPG skills will help you transition to PHP as well as make your RPG apps better be sure to join our webinar with Jon Paris this Thursday, May 19th at 12 EST.

In this session Jon will discuss:

• Key similarities and differences between PHP and RPG
• Top 3 RPG skills that will best equip you to transition to PHP
• How these skills will make your RPG applications better than ever

During the last 20 minutes of this webinar I’ll be doing a demo of WebSmart PHP to show how anyone can quickly create PHP apps with WebSmart PHP. The demo will also cover key WebSmart PHP features that were designed with RPG programmers in mind.

Register for this webinar now!

If you are new to WebSmart or need a refresher on a specific topic be sure to register for our upcoming 2 hour online WebSmart PHP and ILE training sessions that start in May and June. It’s convenient and the price is great, and it’s even better if you enroll by April 29th to take advantage of our $99 promo (regular price is $149).

This is a great way to speed up the learning curve. The courses are conducted online in real-time with an instructor that you can interact with and ask questions. You will be given hands-on lab material that you can complete at your convenience after each course.

View courses or register now.

I spend a fair amount of time worrying about performance. Within the Professional Services group I work with one of our clients, MedAxiom, developing an increasingly large and complex web application. Yet at the same I want to improve the user experience by speeding things up. One of the simpler ways to make a site faster is enabling gzip compression.

Gzipping components is one of ySlow’s recommendations and Steve Souders also recommends it in his book “High Performance Web Sites”. It’s an Apache module that applies gzip compression to certain output before sending it to the client. Once at the client, the browser unzips the content and displays it to the user. The end result is we’re sending less bytes which takes less time.

I set up a few benchmarks before enabling gzip so I could get an idea of the effect it has. I used Firebug’s Net panel to load each page five times and record the total size of the page and load time, I then took the average of the five loads.  Here are the results:

I was blown away by the improvement in load times!  MedAxiom has some pretty heavy Nexus pages so that’s where we saw the greatest improvement.  Yet even on smaller pages we still saw an improvement of 15%-34% in page load times.

Setting up gzip in Apache is pretty easy, you can do it by adding these directives to your Apache config in the appropriate place.

# Load the module that performs the compression.
LoadModule deflate_module /QSYS.LIB/QHTTPSVR.LIB/QZSRCORE.SRVPGM

# Compress all output by default.
SetOutputFilter DEFLATE

# Disable gzipping for images and pdf documents.
# Gzip compression has no effect on these types.
SetEnvIfNoCase Request_URI (gif|jpe?g|png)$ no-gzip dont-vary
SetEnvIfNoCase Request_URI \.pdf$ no-gzip dont-vary

The introduction of Zend Core to the IBM i opened a new world of possibilities for IBM i developers trying to create web applications that would make use of their existing DB2 files while hosting them on the same system. Zend Core was the first step on porting a reliable PHP stack to the IBM i world and while it was indeed a great first step, there was also room for improvement.

The Zend Core distribution made use of an Apache instance that ran in the PASE environment, leaving the IBM HTTP Server Powered by Apache working as a reverse proxy mainly passing the requests to the instance in the PASE environment. As more advanced PHP applications were developed, developers and administrators began to struggle with more complex Apache directives and configuration that were needed because of the reverse proxy. Zend and IBM worked on a solution to eliminate this problem: The new Zend Server for IBM i. In addition to eliminating the Apache server in PASE, new and improved caching algorithms were introduced that have the capability to deliver great performance improvements depending on the nature of the applications.

Mike Pavlak goes into further detail explaining Zend Server’s packaging, new architecture, installation and server versions (Community Edition and Commercial Edition) on the “What’s New with PHP on IBM i?” article hosted at SystemiNetwork.

For those of you that are currently using Zend Core, we recommend the upgrade to Zend Server CE. You can read our KB article “Using WebSmart PHP with Zend Server CE” to get information on how to download and setup Zend Server CE.

The BCD Product Development team has run a series of tests of the following versions of our software at V7R1:

• Catapult 7.6
• Spool-Explorer 4.5
• Exodus 5.1
• WebSmart 8.2
• Presto 2.2
• ProGen 9.5
• DBGen 2.5
• Docu-Mint 6.5
• File-Flash Plus 4.5
• Nexus 3.6 and 4.0

No problems were encountered.

If you have any questions about this, please contact Technical Support.

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