eWeek has posted an interesting article by Darryl K. Taft titled PHP Puts Mainframe Developers in Prime Time. It seems that Wayne Duquaine is excited about PHP and thinks all mainframe programmers should be. Speaking in Baltimore, MD last week, Wayne told a group of mainframe developers that they should learn PHP “because it is coming to the mainframe and it has a short learning curve. PHP is easier to learn than any other Web programming language.” My favorite quote however, is this one.
PHP scripts are five-to-ten times more productive than hand-coding a server application in Java or C from scratch
The article outlines the reasons Duqaine gave for mainframe programmers to begin learning PHP. Without giving away the ending, basically he believes that PHP offers opportunity to mainframe programmers who want to stay in the field.
“For those that elect to stay in the field and avoid early retirement, they have no choice” but to re-tool and learn new technologies, Duquaine said.
He goes on to speculate about the future direction of the Zend and IBM partnership by saying.
The companies have not announced support for Zend Core for IBM on the z/OS operating system for the z/Series mainframe, but sources said that is the direction IBM is leaning toward.
This is an excellent (short, concise, informative, interesting) read and worth the time for anyone interested in PHP on IBM’s mainframes. It’s full of juicy quotes that I wish I could post here but then there would be no reason to visit the original article. So go check it out, I’ll be here when you get back.