PHP and IBM i or any other Computer System

I've been around since before PHP was invented.  I was a big advocate of IBM's Net.Data macro language (which I still think is better than PHP in many ways),  Many of you know that I was a huge advocate of IBM Rational's EGL (Enterprise Generation Language) and convinced quite a number of iSeries customers and software vendors to utilize it. 

I do think that EGL and Net.Data are excellent web development tools, but I did not fully appreciate PHP until I had to create my own low budget web site.  I subscribed to Network Solutions (the original domain name registry company) who now sells hosting on UNIX systems for as little as $12.00 per month.  I happen to like Network Solutions for old times sake (they were the original domain name registry), but there are several other hosting services now including GODADDY.COM who offer very inexpensive web hosting.  There are now many other hosting services including Yahoo, Google, and many, many others.  Prices start at about $10 per month and increase from there.  You can have a pretty robust web site with lots of activity for less than $100 per month.

Well, "web hosting" -- in the old days this was the ability to upload static HTML pages to a server somewhere and have a simple HTML only web site.  Today I noticed that PHP is standard on all of these sites.  Not only is PHP standard, but so is MySQL as a database engine. 

So what did I need?  I needed a simple feedback form that asked for name, address, email, and telephone number.  I wanted to send an email the person entering their data confirming that we got it and would get back to them, and write the data to the database.  I also wanted a simple query that I could run to download data from the database as a CSV File for use in an Excel spreadsheet. 

I thought OH HECK (or some other words) I have to learn PHP and MySQL!  Well, actually I did and I didn't.  I found tons of sample apps that did what I wanted to do from form editing with AJAX.  I found an example that showed me how to send an email, and I found several examples of code for MySQL ranging from an INSERT with Database Validation to a query that formats the output into CSV format. 

During the process which took about 12 hours spread over 3 days I pretty much learned PHP.  If you know any programming language (like Java, Basic, or JavaScript) you know PHP.  The language adheres to modern best practices in terms of language syntax and punctuation.  A good knowledge of HTML is also very helpful and some basic Internet tools knowledge like a little bit about email servers, etc.

Bottom line 3 days and my application was working.

So PHP and MySQL are easy to use.  Is that a reason to use them?  Nope!  There are other easy to use tools.  What makes PHP and MySQL so dynamite is the fact that they are totally pervasive everywhere.   Additionally there is a vast library of free applications, utilities, etc. out there on the Internet for free.  Stuff written in PHP and MySQL's SQL dialect is 100% portable to any platform that runs PHP and MySQL. 

Isn't interesting that IBM advocates PHP over their own proprietary languages and technologies?  IBM is the leading company funding the open source community.  Zend is a huge business partner and PHP counters many proprietary Microsoft offerings.  It also counters several proprietary Adobe offerings.

Folks I was totally stunned when I found out I had a very large disk allocation, MySQL, and PHP on a $12 per month hosted web site!  Think about the implications of this.  PHP and MySQL are everywhere.  They are free for the download and they exist on cheap hosted servers.  You can implement SOA components and interoperate on a cheap standalone server with any other server.

TWELVE DOLLARS PER MONTH!  Compare that to the thousands you are spending and that I have spent in my previous life.  Consider also that if you can learn JavaScript or Basic you can learn PHP! In other words "cheap labor". 

I certainly liked many of the features of EGL and Java but you cannot beat PHP for quick easy to use robust and scalable web applications.  Took me a while but I finally GET IT! 

Bob C.