PHP/MySQL to IBM WebSphere?

March 23, 2007 7:06 AM

I'm a fairly recent college grad that never really worked with an IBM iSeries computer. Now I'm being asked to maintain an existing project at my job which resides on our iSeries machine. Where should I look for advice? I've scoured IBM's resources, and none of them make very much sense at all. I just want to get this project off of my plate.

A little background... I've been doing web development for the past 5 years... but it's all been ColdFusion/XHTML/CSS/PHP/MySQL/SQL Server.

I went into the existing files (.jsp) and edited a lot of them and used some nominal JSP code (jsp:include, jsp:forward) --- but I have absolutely no idea how to test my changes. I've installed a ton of software from IBM (several gigs worth) and I still have no idea where/how to test this app.

All of the documentation I've read doesn't make any sense... or if it does make sense it is completely unrelated to testing this application.

Please help! Thanks!

posted by bofe to Computers & Internet (2 answers total)

Response by poster: Some more background - the project itself writes to a DB/2 database on the iSeries machine. It's a web based project for bill payment.
posted by bofe at 7:41 AM on March 23, 2007

The iSeries used to be known as the AS/400 line. It's the workhorse line of IBM mid-range systems, and one of the most reliable series of 48 and now 64 bit business machines ever developed. Much of the iSeries technology is borrowed from mainframes, and extended. For example, on the iSeries, storage is completely virtualized and abstracted. There is no way to address individual storage units, except through the virtual subsystem, and so you, as a programmer, neither know nor care, where or how data is stored on the physical machine, you just request a resource, and it is up to the virtual machine to supply access to it as you need it. The beauty of this scheme is that all versions of the system since the early 90's support the Integrated File System (IFS) as standard, which can mimic Windows, Mac, UNIX, and native OS400 storage at the same time, on the same hardware, without the need for physical "partitions" or other low level division schemes. There is literally no such thing as a "partition" on an iSeries system, except as your higher level Windows, Mac, UNIX, or other target system may need one emulated to function. Thus calls like '/qsys.lib/qejb.lib/domino.srvpgm' would be an iSeries direction to storage to call the Domino server program, whereever it might exist on the target machine, in the QSYS system library, in the EJB sub-library.

The iSeries is a 64 bit RISC machine, which can provide up to 12 processor functionality, again as a virtually abstracted processing interface. You can run multiple instances of i5 simultaneously, or even run Linux virtual machines as processor "slices."

All jobs on an iSeries run under OS400 or now, System i5, which is a propriatary operating system that includes native DB2 functionality standard. The native iSeries language is RPG, although optional programming feature packs can provide support for C, FORTRAN and COBOL. Websphere support extends this with a proprietary Web services suite built originally upon Apache. You access the virtual machine for management using Operations Navigator, which is a Windows product that allows you to manage an iSeries machine using a native Windows style management interface. In Operations Manager, you'd configure Websphere startup and operational parameters, including such things as the Websphere virtual "root," the Web server configuration files, and the virtual directory structure that will support your applications. Domino server side software of the Lotus integrated messaging/groupware platform known as Domino/Notes. Domino can leverage Websphere support on iSeries, to provide higher level Java functionality in Domino, for such things as distributed Java applications, written as Enterprise Java Beans.

If Websphere and/or Domino is running on the machine, you access the Websphere server with http or https calls on port 80, or whatever port you've configured the Web server to reply on, just like an Apache installation. If Websphere is not running, start it, using whatever startup options are appropriate for your operational includes.
posted by paulsc at 8:24 AM on March 23, 2007 [1 favorite]