“Over the years our customers have commented that they are looking at PHP for a number of reasons,” Pavlak, a consultant for Zend Technologies, wrote. “The most common reason we are hearing in 2009 reflects the fact that open source is no longer an option or a luxury but strategic and cost effective…” Pavlak later added that “no cows are sacred in this new economy.”

As Pavlak notes, all branches of the popular open-source LAMP stack (Linux, Apache, MySQL and PHP/Perl/Python) are supported on the System i. He added that other open-source software customer relationship management (CRM) application SugarCRM allows you to run business applications for free (as a side note, the Young i Professionals has now made SugarCRM available in its sandbox so you can play around with it).

As Pavlak wrote, “IBM has been moving forward with open source for years. Why shouldn’t you?”

Finally, expect some Zend-related news on the System i in the next week or so.

If you believe that competition brings innovation, then the Bytware, PowerTech, Help/Systems trifecta means you’ve got “competing” security solutions all owned by the same company, which means there isn’t any real competition between those three companies. You can’t fake competition.

However, Maxcer doesn’t touch on the possibilities of open source solutions adding to the competitive marketplace of the i market. As the YiPs recently shared, interest in open source options for i is growing.

Nicolaas Vlok, CEO of Vision Solutions shared his opinion about the acquisition of PowerTech by Help/Systems in a recent interview:

“I think it’s a pretty good business decision,” shared Vlok. “I still believe from a software perspective that it’s a market worth investing in and expanding with specifically infrastructure-related software. In the i marketplace, most people looking in the 3-5 years can see an expanded opportunity with i and p.”

Maxcer pointed out that Vision is also a private-equity-owned company, but posits that this hasn’t necessarily negatively affected the innovation in the Power and i world.

Private equity company Thoma Cressey Bravo owns Vision and brokered the deals that led to the acquisition of iTera and Lakeview Technology. Is the System i industry any worse off with a consolidated power player–Vision–instead of three solution providers trading punches and customer contracts? In fact, a larger, more stable company may be better for customers than when one of three might bite the dust entirely.

What do you think? Is open source the answer for innovation woes? What are your concerns?

Brian May wrote from Common Directions, the System i-focused trade show down in Dallas last week. The YiPs had a table down there, and May reported that it “seems everyone at the conference was asking about open source software, Web 2.0, MySQL, and PHP.” He followed that up with another post yesterday saying that he “spoke to lots of people, all of whom were interested in and excited about the site and the open source applications that we have loaded on i.”

If you’re unfamiliar with PHP on i, check out this tip from Andrew Borts as a starting point.

I looked through the course offerings, and found some that looked pretty interesting to me including an entire track on getting ready for V6R1. My interest was also piqued by a session on CL that focuses on new enhancements and fixes to old problems.

“… learn all about the new enhancements that IBM has made to Control Language (CL) in recent releases. Find out how CL can now address a wide range of applications that it couldn’t reach before. Delve into new data types and structured code for easier communication to other jobs on your system. Understand how to declare variables of type pointer in CL and then learn how to use subroutines to divide a CL procedure into tasks of logically related code and understand the types of APIs that CL can now call that used to be unreachable from CL. Take a first-hand look at some of the most annoying problems encountered by CL programmers over the years and get expert advice to overcome them.”

With an esteemed group of experts, the conference looks like it has some good content if you have the money in the budget to check it out. If you’re planning on attending and would like to share your experience with other Search400.com readers, let us know (email editor@search400.com).

This year, their message is about going “green.” Surprise.

Not only that, but read into the details and you’ll discover that they’re only running Linux on Power now. No AIX. No IBM i (they weren’t running IBM i before, but still).

Timothy Prickett Morgan has a good, albeit short, piece, grousing about this U.S. Open development.

Considering that IBM doesn’t own a Linux operating system and has just rejiggered pricing on i 6.1 and AIX 6.1 to make them more competitive with Linux, the Grand Slam systems that IBM makes available to the U.S. Open, the French Open, and the Australian Open would seem to be a perfect place to show how a mix of AIX and i on Power6 iron is the best way to support modern Web applications. I mean, IBM does want to sell its own operating systems, right? And if AIX and i can’t–or won’t–compete against Linux on a level court with a study and straight net, well, what’s the point?

In past years, we’ve written about IBM running the U.S. Open on the Search400.com site. The backbone of the operation used to be System p5 550 servers running AIX and Linux partitions, with the AIX partitions running player search and feedback applications. Meanwhile, Linux partitions on the System p servers and two System i servers ran other Web-serving applications as well as applications at the event hosting the Web site’s scoring system.

Now, apparently, it’s all Linux. At least it’s still on Power, but like Morgan says, this would be a prime opportunity to show off AIX and IBM i. Instead, Linux takes over the No. 1 seed.

Could you describe the specific circumstances of the internal problem that your company was having that led to the development of the Watchdog program?

We have service level agreements (SLAs) that require our iSeries box to be up 24 x 7 x 365, and we need to ensure that if there is a problem we address it immediately. There are financial penalties if we do not resolve problems in a specific period of time. Prior to Watchdog, the systems were checked manually. This presented two problems: 1) Operators were involved in the manual checking rather than other billable activities — resulting in reduced revenue. 2) The manual method was not scalable (i.e., more boxes mean more people). We looked at the existing packages on the market and they were too expensive. We had a very basic need and we did not want to purchase additional products in order to make the monitoring software run. We are a software development shop, so why not build it ourselves!

Why Java? Was this the immediate solution, or did it just happen to work well? Did you consider other options?

Java was the immediate solution for the front end interface. We had in-house expertise and it is platform independent. Using Java also allowed us to work with open source tools. We had not worked with Java Persistence API (JPA), Spring or LDAP on the iSeries but had been reading a lot about them in the Trades. Since we are a Java/RPG shop, we wanted to try out some new technologies and frameworks. So, this was a perfect opportunity to solve an internal need and further develop our consulting skill set.

For the back end, the programs that gather key health indicators are RPG service programs. In terms of data access, we let the iSeries do what it does best, crunch data. Additionally, the type of information we needed to gather was iSeries-specific so it did not make a lot of sense to use Java because it was already tied to the platform.

How long did it take to develop the Watchdog program?

We started in November 2007 of last year. The application was developed on nights and weekends so we did not finish it until March 2008. Had we been working on it full-time, it probably would have taken a couple of months.

What problems did you encounter along the way? (Were there work-arounds or problems that you had to deal with?)

We did have a few problems. We wanted to use a tool to generate JPA entities from SQL tables. The tool needed to run on the latest version of Eclipse so we had to abandon WebSphere development studio client (WDSC) and go with Eclipse in order to use the tool. We also used the IBM Interrogated application server released in January of 2008. There was not a lot of documentation and/or knowledge regarding this product. So, we had to engage IBM in order to resolve some of these problems. The LDAP web based interface was not available on WebSphere 6.1 so we had to find an alternate tool to create schemas and enter test data.

There are similar products available — why didn’t you invest in one of the competitor’s products instead of spending the time and energy developing your own?

There are definitely some very good products on the market that have some of the same functionality. As I mentioned above, we thought the products were too expensive and did not like the front end. The interface to the user was either green screen or a very difficult to read dashboard. Also, you had to purchase the software that had a traditional price based model — the larger the model and processing group, the more expensive the software. We would have had to purchase software maintenance in addition to the upfront cost. Some of the products also required purchasing additional third-party products in order from them to work.

What size company is Watchdog preferable for?

We are providing this software as a service (SaaS). We will establish a secured connection to the customer, install a client on their iSeries which will gather the monitoring data and configure the alert system as well as provide the Web Services to send the data to a First Option Inc. server. We charge a monthly fee that includes rental of the client software and the graphical front end. The rental fee is not based on the iSeries model or processor group and you do not have to buy software maintenance.

We think this will appeal to small- to medium-sized businesses that require a solid monitoring system for a price that makes business sense. We can also bundle a remote monitoring service that will respond and resolve problems on the iSeries. This allows small- to medium-sized businesses to focus on their core business not running a System Operations Group.

I started in the software development business writing code on a S36. The most overwhelming change over the past 20 years is the number of options available to develop and deploy software. From the creation of the development environment to the deployment of the application on a production server, there are a number of products to install and integrate. It’s easy to get lost in the technology and lose focus on the business need. It is extremely important to engage an experienced development team who understands that the requirement is always a superior software product to support your business need.

Tech book publisher No Starch Press is auctioning a copy of its new pub, Absolutely FreeBSD by Michael W. Lucas, to raise money for the FreeBSD Foundation, a nonprofit organization dedicated to promoting the Unix-like FreeBSD platform. The winner of the auction receives a signed copy of “Absolute FreeBSD” and a certificate of authenticity.

The ongoing auction runs through Nov. 2, 2007. The FreeBSD Foundation is using eBay’s charitable MissionFish service to provide this auction at a reduced rate.

BCD is offering WebSmart PHP free for a 30-day trial. The normal licensing fee for the complete application is $4,250 for up to two developer seats and $1,950 for additional seats. BCD also offers an unlimited license for $13,500, according to their press release. Discounts are available.

I’d never used/programmed PGP before, but in only 3 hours I had a working prototype on my local laptop. Wikipedia taught me about PGP, and the Bouncy Castle documentation and source code taught me how to implement it. Another 5 hours later, my System i developers and I had the full-blown solution running on the System i, called from their RPG program. It was a big team accomplishment!