Seiden Group Announces Free Access to CommunityPlus+ PHP for IBM i
Enhanced PHP RPMs come with optional setup & support services
Seiden Group, specialists in IBM i open source development, today releases their enhanced CommunityPlus+ PHP RPMs to the general public. The Seiden PHP repository, accessible free to registrants, streamlines the installation of license-free PHP while delivering solid performance.
The CommunityPlus+ offering includes PHP 7.3 and 7.4 (PHP 8 coming soon); ODBC, PDO_ODBC, ibm_db2, and PDO_IBM database connectivity; the PHP Toolkit; popular extensions such as mail(), SSH2, LDAP, and Xdebug; enhanced configurations; and documentation. The RPMs support double-byte character sets. Seiden Group also offers setup, migration, and support packages to businesses that rely on PHP applications.
Since IBM announced RPM-based PHP as the next-generation replacement for Zend Server Basic licenses a year ago, many organizations have turned to Seiden Group for help in migrating to license-free PHP.
GRAR, the COMMON Innovation Award-winning website, moved to CommunityPlus+ PHP in October 2020. Larry Amond, Director of Application Development, explains, “Our business applications rely on PHP to provide fast and accurate information to our public web users, as well as our membership and staff. Alan and the team at Seiden Group have been excellent to work with moving us to CommunityPlus+ PHP. The migration was quick and easy with their support and guidance, and we were able to make the move without any disruption to our users.”
According to Alan Seiden, he has fielded requests for support for the past few years. “Clients engage us for PHP support because they trust us to resolve their issues quickly and accurately, whether it’s an esoteric configuration issue, toolkit question, or a fix to an extension or PHP itself. We also include proactive phone calls and advice, so our clients are always confident about their PHP environment. Because we charge no license fees for PHP, our support has to be top-notch. Our business model relies on support revenue to offset our ongoing investment in updating and enhancing RPMs for the IBM i community.”
Web developer Dan Lanza described how Seiden Group smoothed his company’s move to CommunityPlus+, even though their PHP framework used an extension not initially present in standard community PHP. “The transition to RPM PHP was virtually seamless,” he said. “RPM PHP ran side by side with Zend during the transition. Thanks to a utility provided by Seiden Group, we knew exactly which extensions we needed before we even began. Seiden Group quickly built an additional extension for us, long before our goal to go live!”