How poor are they that have not patience!

—William Shakespeare

Written by Jan Jorgensen

Faster, faster, faster! Every day, we are met with these demands: we have to develop fast applications that at the same must be flexible, feature-rich, and user-friendly. They must run on the Internet in a browser—and not just one browser! Nope. Users like Opera, Safari, Chrome, Firefox, and IE. And some developers do not fully agree on how to read the specifications laid out by the w3.org, so they all add their little flavors and leave you as a developer out in the dark screaming your head off. Get the picture?

If you're serious about programming in PHP, get a book that treats you that way.

Written by Cal Evans

I hate getting books for review that are written by friends of mine. I have a strict policy that I won't review a book I don't like. This leads to awkward conversations if, after skimming the book, I decide not to review it. Thankfully, that isn't the case with this book. Today, I want to talk about You Want to Do WHAT with PHP?, written by my friend and former co-worker, Kevin Schroeder. (I used to work at Zend; Kevin still does.)

We all know we need to program for the Web, but we hear all kinds of stories about how hard Web languages are. This article compares two of the most popular options.

Written by Joe Pluta

The Web beckons. The green-screen has been more than adequate for years, even decades, but the pressure for something more modern keeps building. If you don't figure out how to expose your business logic via some sort of browser-based user interface, the Windows crowd is going to demand a GUI solution. That means the business logic starts migrating away from RPG. Not long after that, the database itself follows, and it's goodbye IBM i. So you need a Web solution and you need it now, but how do you get there? Today I'll compare the fundamental characteristics of the two most popular options for the IBM i community.

A conversion table is a very simple concept. In PHP, it's also very simple to implement.

Written by Kevin Schroeder

Editor's note: This article is an excerpt from You Want to Do WHAT with PHP?, a new book from MC Press. 

Computers know nothing about language. Actually, when you get right down to it, they know nothing of numbers either. All that computers know is on and off. They can change the ons and offs based on other ons and offs. If certain ons are on, the processor will do one thing; if they are off, it will do another. A computer is perfectly happy with this arrangement.

However, the purpose of a computer is to do work for a human.

Here, we look at one of the file formats that you can manage easily with PHP.

Written by Kevin Schroeder

Editor's note: This article is an excerpt from You Want to Do WHAT with PHP?, a new book from MC Press.

The second file format we'll look at is WAV, the Waveform Audio File Format. WAV is a relatively simple format for storing uncompressed audio data. It is easy to interpret, and I happen to have a WAV file on my desktop, so it makes good sense for me to use it as an example.

The key to working with almost any binary file structure is interpreting that structure.

You don't have to learn MVC to start using Zend Framework.

Written by Jeff Olen

Recently, at the COMMON conference, I presented several PHP sessions. Two sessions were aimed toward attendees that are relative newcomers to PHP, and they were very well-received. To my thinking, it's time to raise the bar. While many of you are still just learning PHP and are more in the "testing it out" stage than doing actual development, there are a lot of developers on the IBM i who are writing real-world PHP applications. So this article is the first of what will be several focusing on transitioning from using plain PHP and the procedural model to harnessing the power of Zend Framework (ZF) and the Model-View-Controller (MVC) design pattern.

It's everything you need to know, from the bottom up.

Written by Mike Myers

Let me first explain a little about myself. I wrote my first program in 1982 on a System/34 (RPG II). Two years later, I was on the System/38 (RPG III), and soon after, the AS/400 (RPG IV, etc.). So, yes, I am an old green-screen developer—working hard, I might add, to update my skill set using Rational Developer for i for SOA Construction (RDi SOA).

I found Joe's book very useful in introducing me to the key concepts of EGL—namely widgets, library functions, reusable components, and completely encapsulated shared projects.

It seems like new Web language options appear every time you blink. The one you choose can make or break your Web development project, and this article is going to guide you toward the right choice.

Written by Joe Pluta

It's getting difficult out there. We've got more Web languages than we know what to do with, and we've heard no end of the pros and cons of each. People point out the sheer number of programmers for one language or the huge base of applications for the other. Some pundits appeal to purity of architecture; others swear by ease of use. The arguments are endless and opinionated and frankly pretty hard to objectively judge one way or the other.