WI400: The WI400 Team has created its own PHP stack on IBM i!
The project started as an experiment in research and development about the open source possibilities of IBM i and had as objective to bring open source tools natively on AS400. In the past, some positive experiences had been made with libraries such as Ghostscript and PDFlib, currently used in various projects.
Now the experience has allowed us to compile natively the PHP with its extensions, creating optimized stacks for various needs. All this was done using open source tools such as GCC and without source code changes sign that it is now established that in its PASE partition, the IBM i is truly became an Open machine.
Tested for more than a year in development environment, and for months in a production environment, the stack has proven reliability, this shows that we have found the right road to compile and configure.
We advise however to install ZendServer stack, for complex production environments, but this new stack opens new scenarios for small and medium-sized enterprises, who can think of installing PHP directly from OPEN-Source repository or for special configurations to all levels.
Soon we will publish the complete guide for compiling of PHP on IBM i.