Zend

Zend for System i now only free for the first year?

The IBM i development blog has heard from a user who has been told that Zend Core for System i is only free for the first year. Whether this is true for all customers or not is unclear, but here’s a snippet of what the end user has heard from Zend:

“We can install Zend Core for i5 and all nine developers can use Zend Studio for i5 and we can continue to utilize these products free of charge for one year and one year only. When the first, free year concludes, in order to continue using the Zend products, we will need to purchase…”

The IBM i development blog says that they’ve been using Zend on i for three years now with no demand for payments.

Update: It seems as though support for Zend Core is free only for the first year, but the software itself remains free past one year and beyond.

Legacy AS/400 meets the future of IBM i at COMMON 2009

While at COMMON, the push-pull of new versus old technologies for the IBM i (AS/400, iSeries, System i) has been an underlying theme. Trevor Perry’s recent assertion that IBM’s marketing of the i could kill the system sets the stage for the discussion. His experience has been shared at the conference and has been debated. On Tuesday I had a couple of great conversations and learned more about a couple of new products that are looking to the future.

The first is Zend PHP Server, which takes DB2 400 to the Web. Mike Pavlak demonstrates Zend PHP tools: Zend Core, Zend Studio for Eclipse, and Zend Platform.

Halcyon Software’s John Dominic, Channel Manager, shared the Systems Management Suite enterprise console interface and the message communicator product that allows two-way communication from a mobile device to the AS/400.

(When Halcyon wasn’t using their flat-screen to show how their products worked, they were challenging attendees to ski jumping on a Wii Fit that the winner got to take home).
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