News Updates

WebSmart PHP Develops PHP Web Applications With No Proprietary Code

Business Computer Design Int’l Inc. (BCD), a System i application development tool provider with thousands of installations, officially releases WebSmart PHP for general availability after four months of intensive beta testing by more than 100 System i developers. WebSmart PHP can now be downloaded from BCD’s Web site along with a four-page data sheet and a very detailed 28-page white paper. The extensive development initiative behind the PHP variant of BCD’s widely used WebSmart ILE solution began 15 months ago, the company says.

Developers who write programs for the IBM System i and iSeries platforms can now quickly construct PHP programs and applications with WebSmart PHP. These programs are 100-percent native PHP, allowing a single development effort to create System i and multiplatform applications that also run on Linux, UNIX and Windows servers. Developers can access multiple disparate databases and call existing RPG programs.

Since the beta release of WebSmart PHP was first announced at COMMON in May, it's captured the interest of high-level executives at IBM and Zend, as well as several respected System i industry analysts. BCD is the first software vendor to offer a complete and easy-to-use PHP application development environment that exploits the PHP capabilities brought to the System i platform by Zend. Many experts believe that pent-up demand for a workable Web- development strategy, coupled with the popularity of PHP will result in quick uptake for BCD’s new PHP application development tool.

Bob Anderson, IT Director at Kent Sporting Goods in New London, Ohio, was one of the System i developers who participated in BCD's four-month WebSmart PHP beta test. "Testing and evaluating WebSmart PHP was an unusually positive experience for me. I found BCD's tool to be very stable, very easy to use and both very developer and user-friendly," Anderson says.