Article Sponsor

Business Computer Design Int l, Inc. (BCD)

Address

950 York Road, Hinsdale, IL, USA, 60521-9717

Phone

630-986-0800

Fax

630-986-0926

E-mail

Website

http://www.bcdsoftware.com/

BCD makes it easier for you to modernize iSeries - System i - AS400 applications and business processes. Just as we have for over 10,000 clients, our advanced and tightly integrated solutions will take you as far as your business requirements demand and your imagination permits.

Trust BCD and our solutions. You'll soon see why thousands of organizations prefer BCD's proven modernization solutions, and over 35 industry awards have been awarded to BCD for software excellence. Applications built with BCD solutions transact billions of dollars worth of business and automatically manage millions of report pages and documents with the highest degree of reliability and a minimal amount of maintenance.

For 30 years iSeries - System i and prior IBM midrange users have come to depend on BCD for innovative and affordable modernization solutions to improve their business and end-user productivity. We're a recognized industry leader who delivers easy-to-use, well supported and well documented solutions. And, we continually monitor client feedback, and reinvest significant amounts of revenue into research and development.

Try our solutions, become a client, and we promise to keep delivering the most innovative, affordable and high-quality solutions. And, we further promise to give you the best technical support the industry has to offer to ensure your success.

This commitment has led to very high client satisfaction and industry award recognition. We are also proud of the following:

- BCD is a Charter member of IBM's System i Developer Roadmap.
- BCD is a Member of IBM's System i ISV Advisory Council.
- We are an IBM Advanced Business Partner.
- IBM and BCD have signed a distribution agreement that lets IBM distribute WebSmart and Catapult with all System i shipments and all i5/OS V5R4 upgrades.
- To date we have proudly received 35+ Industry Awards for Software Excellence including multiple:
- Search400.com Products of the Year - Gold Award Winners.
- IBM System i Magazine Honor Roll Awards.
- System i News Editors and Readers Choice APEX Award Winners.
- Showcase Products Excellence Award Winners.
- COMMON Conference Award for Best Traditional Lab... and others.
- Over 10,000 worldwide customers have become successful with our solutions.
- Over 30,000 software solutions have been implemented worldwide.
- Over 100 International and Domestic Business Partners distribute BCD solutions.
- We are a long standing member of COMMON's Expo Advisory Council.
- We are System i News / Network's longest running consecutive advertiser. Every month for 24 years.
- BCD is MC Press / Showcase's longest running advertiser.
- And one of the longest consecutive IBM Tech Conference participating vendors.
- We are COMMON Conference Expo's longest participating vendor. Over 30 consecutive conferences.

Try BCD's award winning solutions for yourself. Call to discuss your business needs and we'll prove how we can modernize your business applications and processes more affordably and with greater ease. We look forward to hearing from you and having the opportunity to earn your confidence and trust.

Thank you for considering BCD and our solutions.

 

Figure 1: WebSmart PHP provides tight database integration with PHP code.

Several important features of WebSmart PHP qualify it as a RAD tool rather than just an IDE:

• Intelligent templates for enterprise business applications
• Tight System i database integration (both DB2 UDB and MySQL databases)
• Central Repository for optional data modeling
• Visual HTML design tool
• PHP functions prototyping, documentation, and management
• Enterprisewide project and change management

Intelligent Templates for DB2 SQL, MySQL and Record-Level Access

WebSmart PHP supports applications for the System i that use MySQL databases and either DB2 SQL or record-level access (RLA) functions to process the database. The included intelligent templates are grouped into families based on look and feel and database type/access method. Each template performs a typical business function, such as working with data (add, change, delete, search, or list records), using input-capable lists for transaction-oriented applications, etc.

Because WebSmart PHP natively supports MySQL, you can easily create PHP applications that run on the System i or other platforms. The tight integration with MySQL makes it easy for you to work with those databases. You can see all the tables and their fields. To include them in your code, you simply click from a list to select them during the initial wizard process; later, you can drag and drop them to place them into HTML or your PHP code.

The intelligent templates generate complete working programs. Once you have created a PHP program using the templates, you can modify and enhance the code infinitely using the integrated PHP code editor.

Central Repository: Support for Multiple Databases

The Central Repository lets you define business, database, and presentation rules at the database level, effectively providing powerful data modeling capabilities. You attach your rules to fields in your files or tables. Rules can consist of the format of data when presented for output or input purposes, relations (links) to other files or tables, validations, and custom calculations.

The Central Repository also supports inheritance, so you can define certain data types as having code associated with them and then reference those data types with fields in your files. For example, if you store dates in many of your files as eight-digit numbers in YYYYMMDD format, you can define one conversion rule for a date data type to display those dates in a local format and then have all date fields reference that data type.

The Central Repository also supports the System i native DB2 UDB database, MySQL running on System i, or any MySQL database hosted on any server type. WebSmart PHP keeps track of each database type and provides prompts appropriate to each file or table to help you define your rules. Once you've defined rules in the Repository, the intelligent templates can exploit them. For example, as you go through the steps in the design process for a PHP application, WebSmart PHP will include the appropriate repository extensions in the application design. In addition, these extensions are stored on the System i server so a group of developers can share them.

Next-Generation Visual HTML Design Tool

WebSmart PHP includes both text-based and visual HTML design tools. The visual HTML design tool is a third-generation designer that makes it easy to place HTML design elements on your page layouts and intermingle PHP server code with HTML presentation code. This helps you become productive quickly, without having to know how to code HTML tags. You get a true picture of the actual application as you work on it. In addition, you can switch back and forth from design to code modes, so it's easy to use both textual and visual methods to create pages.

You can easily integrate database fields by placing them on your pages, intermingle server-side code in your page layouts without disrupting the visual appearance, and move elements around on the page by clicking and dragging.

Figure 2: WebSmart PHP employs a next-generation visual HTML tool.

PHP Functions Prototyping and Management

PHP has over 5,000 published functions. Organizing these and navigating through them is a challenge for developers. WebSmart PHP arranges these functions in tabs grouped by category and documents the prototype and syntax of each function. When you're editing PHP code, the editor takes advantage of these prototypes to provide real-time syntax checking, helping to eliminate basic coding errors.

Project and Change Management

WebSmart PHP takes advantage of the same project management features available in the ILE version of the tool. These provide robust enterprisewide development tools, allowing multiple developers to work on a project with tight controls over development efforts. It's also easy to set up Q/A, development, and production environments with WebSmart PHP.

WebSmart PHP will be available in beta version June 15 and for general release in the fourth quarter. Contact BCD to participate in the beta.

Sales

Business Computer Design Int'l, Inc.
950 York Road
Hinsdale, Illinois
USA 60521-9717
Tel: 630.986.0800
Web: www.bcdsoftware.com
Email: This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it

Technical Support

ExcelSystems Software Development Inc.
#101-9724 4th Street
Sidney, British Columbia
Canada V8L 2Y7
Tel: 250.655.1766
Fax: 250.655.1733
Web: www.bcdsoftware.com/iseriessupport/
Email: This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it

Duncan Kenzie is President and CTO of BCD Technical Support, the development and support group for WebSmart, a popular System i Web development tool, and Nexus, a portal product specifically designed for System i, iSeries, and AS/400 servers. Duncan has 30 years of experience on the midrange systems platform creating software for both green-screen and native Web environments.