Archive for July, 2006

Search400.com had an article yesterday titled System i revenues slide:

Revenues for the System i dipped 7% in the second quarter, marking the third consecutive drop the server platform has seen.

Sales plunged 22% in the first quarter and 12% in the fourth quarter last year. The three consecutive quarterly drops follow three consecutive quarterly surges, when IBM pushed the iSeries line with upgrades and aggressive marketing.

During that time, IBM pushed the platform hard, running ads in TV and print media. It also increased support for its independent software vendors (ISVs) and developed its internal software applications.

A webcast by Mr. Loughridge (President & CFO) this past Tuesday (July 18th) expained. The situation is not as bad as the article came across.

We were unable to ship to meet all of our customer demand… our unusually high unfulfilled orders due to end to end supply chain problems… if we had been able to ship based on our normal… we would have been about even.

You can here the webcast here.

I set out a couple days ago, to see how I could use an existing Java class or Jar within a PHP application. From what I found there are essentially two ways of going about this. The first is to integrate Java support directly into PHP using a regular HTTP server, while the second was to deploy a custom made WAR file into a J2EE container like Tomcat.

One thing for sure in this world: PHP programmers do not want the J2EE world forced upon them. The solution for me was obvious: integrate Java support directly into PHP. I had a couple options to tackle this. I thought about writing my own library, which would use RPC or JNI calls to connect with the existing JAR file, or perhaps use an existing PECL package, but after a little research the best option was to use the open source project PHP/Java Bridge. The project had received rave reviews and in tests destroyed its competition in performance; by using it own custom protocol to facilitate data transfer.

Installation was also a breeze. Assuming you have Apache and PHP already installed, copy the appropriate .dll file from the JavaBrdige.war into extension_dir (as defined in php.ini). For convince rename it to php_java.dll.

for PHP >= 4.3.4 use php-4-java-x86-windows.dll
for PHP >= 5.0.0 use php-5.0-java-x86-windows.dll
for PHP >= 5.1.0 use java-x86-windows.dll

Next, copy JavaBridge.jar from the War file also, into the extension_dir directory. Then open the php.ini file and add the new extension, i.e.

extension=php_java.dll

That’s it, whatever jar file your going to be using, place it in the lib folder of your php installation. Restart the server and you should be good to go.

Interesting article, the first full release of PHP is due at month end. The driver I installed here at the Toronto Lab doesn’t have RPG support yet, this one will.

Zend Software is gearing up to deliver its long-awaited PHP software for the System i at the end of the month. The widely used scripting language for building dynamic, server-based Web apps promises to usher the System i into the world of modern Web development.

According to Zend, PHP has several advantages over other Web-development technologies, not the least of which, for some shops, is that it reduces dependency on the processor-intensive, Java-based WebSphere. Open-source PHP is lightweight, high performing, and offers a short learning curve.

Zend Core for i5/OS, available free from IBM, supports PHP scripts to access data in the System i database and RPG and Cobol applications.

Here is the link

A little while ago a new Lab product came out called Google Trends. The service attempts to give some insight into what regions, cities, people, etc. are searching for a given term. With a push from Ed Brills post, I was on my way.

I did a comparison of i5 (blue), iSeries (red) and System i (orange). Of the three, the most distinct is iSeries, because no one will really search the term iSeries without meaning to search for the IBM product. On the other hand, people in California might search I5 for the interstate highway.

Nevertheless, some of the results are pretty interesting:

This is the last thing I do for this project. It’s been fun, we made a great product, but this is it. I put the 3 robot videos on Google Video, take a look if you like. The first video is rescuing 3 victims (eggs), the second video is blockage clearing, and the third video is security camera footage of the Gates’ rescue. You can read more about the project here.