Enterprise PHP

I arrived home last night after a slightly mind numbing day of reviewing and fixing tests (30 done, another 80 to go) for PHP's ext/imap extension to find that my copy of php|architect had arrived! A cup of tea, a warm fire and something good to read - heaven!

I work for a company that has a bit of a history in enterprise computing, so I read Ivo Jansch's article with interest, I'm certainly looking forward to more in his series. Ivo mentions WebSphere sMash (aka Project Zero), inside sMash we run PHP on a JVM - this really is PHP, many of the extensions we use are PHP extensions we just use a different engine from that in the reference implementation because of the cool things we can do by making it easy for PHP and Java to communicate.

This leads on to something else that happened last week. You probably don't realise it but it's very likely that sometime during the last week you will have have used IBM's CICS technology. Really? Yes - if you have bought something at a supermarket, taken money out at an ATM, had a parcel delivered to your house you have probably been a user of CICS because it forms so much of the underlying structure of commercial systems.

Last week PHP made it into CICS, PHP is now being used to build agile front ends and RESTful interfaces for the technology that underpins most of the world's large scale commercial systems. You don't get much more into The Enterprise than that!

I'm going to stop there because I can feel a bad Captain Kirk joke coming on....beam me up ScottMac!