CICS Support for PHP

Does your business need a simple, agile script-driven enabler to create additional services reusing your existing CICS application assets? Do you want to enable REST-style interfaces to widen and simplify access to CICS applications and data? If so, then the CICS Supportpac CA1S is for you.

A user forum has been set up to allow users of this SupportPac to interact with other users and the CICS PHP development team. The user forum can be used as a repository of information to gain a better understanding of PHP in CICS, learn how to debug problems, make requests and give feedback.

• Click here for the user forum
• To see a short video of the capability, click here

PHP is a very popular scripting language used by many developers all over the world. It is included in WebSphere sMash alongside Groovy and now with SupportPac CA1S IBM is offering the capability to use PHP scripts as part of your RESTful enablement of CICS applications. PHP has outstanding productivity characteristics and a simple yet powerful programming model and development paradigm. By offering PHP on CICS Transaction Server Version 3.2, we are providing another option for opening up yet more of your enterprise CICS application to simple HTTP access from a diverse range of service requesters.

This SupportPac complements our earlier offering CA8K which provides the capability to deliver CICS data as Atom Feeds. You can use the PHP scripting language capabilities in CA1S, which are shared with WebSphere sMash, to extend the range of CICS assets that can be exposed as REST services. Providing the ability to deploy and execute PHP scripts as CICS services accessing existing CICS programs and a range of CICS resources. Atom Feeds and PHP are both exciting opportunities to explore the use of RESTful and Web 2.0-style interfaces to your enterprise application assets.

The PHP technology inside CA1S is a subset of the WebSphere sMash product which is a complete Web application platform for developing and running modern Web applications. The technology behind WebSphere sMash, including a PHP runtime, is developed following a community driven commercial development model at www.projectzero.org

By exploiting the JVM used in CICS Transaction Server for z/OS, PHP script execution employs zAAP processors in your System z mainframe. Using continuous mode JVMs in CICS allows the PHP implementation to fully exploit the efficiency of the Just-In-Time compiler to optimise script execution. A exclusive feature of the PHP implementation in CA1S is direct, same process interaction with Java classes and objects via a 'PHP-Java Bridge'. As well as the CICS runtime services, CA1S provides many of the standard extensions to the base engine which make PHP so powerful.

Using the facilities built into this supportpac will allow RESTful services to be easily created that exploit existing CICS COMMAREA applications. As well as existing application components, CA1S allows PHP scripts to access DB2 tables via PHP Data Objects (PDO) using the CICS JDBC driver.

Employing selected development and deployment paradigms from WebSphere sMash, CA1S focuses on power through simplicity to make it easy to install PHP support into CICS Transaction Server, develop applications using PHP and dynamic scripting concepts and deploy those applications. The standard CICS support for the HTTP transport and Pipeline configuration are used in conjunction with CA1S to provide flexibility to chose to deploy a business service using SOAP, Atom or sMash-style REST interfaces.

Read the CA1S User's Guide for full information on installing, setting up and exploiting REST support in CICS using PHP.