Connect PHP to IBM i (AS/400)

Question

I've got an upcoming project wherein I will need to connect our website (PHP5/Apache 1.3/OpenBSD 4.1) to our back-end system running on a iSeries with OS400 V5R3 so that I can access some tables stored there. I've done some checking around but am running into some roadblocks.

From what I've seen the DB2 extensions and DB2 software from IBM only run under Linux. I've tried compiling the extensions with all the software from IBM and even tried their precompiled ibm_db2 extension with no luck. IBM only supports Linux so I turned on the Linux emulation in the kernel but that didn't seem to help anything.

If anyone has run across getting everything to run natively under OpenBSD that would be great, but what I think I may have to do is setting up a second server running CentOS with DB2 installed (most likely via ZendCore for IBM since it seems to do all this for me) and the driver so that I can set up a small transaction server that I can post against and get a JSON representation of the DB2 data that I need.

Does the second option seem overkill or does anyone else have any better ideas?

Answer 1

To second @John Downey, I've gotten connectivity to work with PHP on an AS/400 with unixODBC.

Check your phpinfo() to see if unixODBC is available in it. I didn't have to compile it in on SLES 10.

Answer 2

A web service is almost certainly the way to go. I'm sure you've already thought of this, but since you're doing PHP on both sides, you can shortcut things a little bit by using serialize() to build your response data instead of building a proper XML document. It's less flexible over the long run, but it will probably get you up and running more quickly.