Tracking, installing, configuring and testing dozens of PHP libraries and drivers is a time sink for developers, testers and administrators. The rapid updates and code changes in today’s fast-paced Web application arena further aggravate the challenges of maintaining reliable and secure PHP runtime environments.

Zend Server for IBM i includes a production-ready, tested stack that incorporates PHP, Zend Framework, required extensions and drivers.

Zend Server for IBM i customers have access to Zend’s technical support, and receive online software updates, hot fixes and security patches, in PTF format, to ensure they run the most reliable, secure, and up-to-date version of PHP. Read about the Service Level Agreement (SLA) Zend provides to its customers.

Many of the problems encountered during application deployment or in production occur because different PHP versions and configurations are used in development, testing and production. Zend Server for IBM i enables you to deploy your PHP applications with confidence, ensuring every member of your team uses the same, highly reliable environment consistently through each stage of the application life cycle.

When things go wrong with your application, you want to know about it as soon as possible, and resolve the problem before end-users are impacted. Zend Server for IBM i enables you to take a proactive approach when it comes to ensuring the best user experience by monitoring PHP application execution and alerting you to critical problems such as:

Optimal application performance

A high-quality user experience is expected from business-critical Web applications, even during peak loads, yet deploying more hardware to increase performance may prove to be costly. Zend Server for IBM i provides multiple capabilities for improving application response times and minimizing resource utilization.

• Code Acceleration – PHP bytecode caching increases performance with no application changes
• Full page caching – A URL-based HTML output cache that does not require any application changes
• Partial page caching – A set of functions that allow developers to cache data in shared memory or to disk

Web applications generally follow a synchronous communication paradigm. However, some tasks are better suited to asynchronous execution. Long-running report generation, order processing, database cleanup, and pulling of RSS feeds are some examples of jobs that can be executed asynchronously. Zend Server for IBM i incorporates a job queue to provide full support for creating, executing and managing jobs to optimize application performance and reduce server load, minimizing application bottlenecks and improving the end-user experience.

Read more about Zend Server job queue »

If you have business-critical applications running on IBM i, how can you take advantage of PHP to modernize those applications while ensuring that they're fast, secure and reliable? How do you integrate data coming from RPG or from DB2?

Zend Server for IBM i includes the PHP Toolkit for IBM i, which is available through partnership between Zend and AURA Equipments. The PHP Toolkit for IBM i enables easy access to IBM i applications, data, and proprietary features. Zend Server for IBM i also provides a bridge to integrate 5250 devices, DB2 connectivity, and more to make it easy to build and run PHP applications on IBM i while leveraging existing code.

Learn more about the 5250 bridge in Zend Server for IBM i »

The community edition (CE) of Zend Server for IBM i is a PHP runtime environment that comes embedded in IBM i. One free year of Zend Silver Support is included with Zend Server CE for IBM i thanks to the partnership between Zend and IBM. Zend Server CE for IBM i does not include application monitoring, diagnostics or page caching.