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16 Jun

PHP and Connecting to IBM?s AS/400

I'm not going to go into details into the hardships I suffered while researching ways to make a PHP database connection to an IBM AS/400 Server and the hundreds of pages and blog postings I read during the process. I'm going to concentrate on what worked for us.

The first step is to review the requirement for System I Access for Linux from IBM's website, it's is also available for Windows.

The next step is to setup the iSeries Server to allow System I Access to work, you can view the requirements here.

Now you need to setup your Linux server. Please check the requirements for System I Access first, then download the files, and follow the directions for installing System I Access.

Linux requirements for running iSeries Access for Linux.
  • GNU C Library (GLibc 2.2)
  • Red Hat package manager (RPM 3.0)
  • Runtime environment (OpenMotif 2.0 or later for the 5250 emulator)
  • unixODBC driver manager version 2.0.11 or later must be installed on the client. See the unixODBC Project web site for more information on the driver manager and to download the latest level of the driver manager.
Recommended Linux Distributions.
  • SUSE LINUX Enterprise Server 9 and later
  • Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4 and later
The final step involves writing the PHP code. Fortunately, System I Access provides source code examples. The link is kind of hidden, just look for "I accept. Download." There's also an IBM redbook on using System I Series.

The link below has sample code that we used for the IBM iSeries database connection, it uses PHP's PDO class.

getContact.php - Code example
From the Workbench, PHP
by Ken Foubert | 6/16/2009 8:15am | Comments (0)

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