IBM has officially blessed PHP on the mainframe, and now supplies a standard PHP package as a free orderable option. PHP provides a number of benefits: high productivity (5 times faster to build a Web based app than using C or COBOL), quick turnaround, and lots of built-in functionality to accelerate development of both Web apps and system programming type apps.
PHP is a simple but powerful language for creating Web Content, including HTML, XML, and SOAP.
It provides built in native libraries (written in C), that provide high speed access to backends like DB2, Oracle, and flat files. PHP also provides a command line script facility, allowing system administration and related tasks to be automated using PHP scripts.
This session is a technical session that describes what PHP is, what its advanatages are that make it so popular, and describes its key features.
It then then walks through several PHP examples that run on z/OS's PHP support, showing how PHP can be utilized on the mainframe.