Zend Core for IBM: now generally available

Just wanted to point out that Zend Core for IBM is now generally available. If you need to get up and running with PHP and DB2 for Linux, UNIX, and Windows, this is a pretty cool free package that will make your life pretty easy on Linux (x86, x86-64, POWER) and AIX.

This less than 100MB package includes a precompiled set of PHP 5.0.4 binaries, including the ibm_db2 extension and a small DB2 client. You also get IBM Cloudscape 10.0 and the IBM JRE so that you can develop and deploy against a very small footprint database.

Finally, Zend Core for IBM includes a nice Web interface for configuring PHP, including enabling and disabling various extensions.

If you're comfortable compiling PHP and extensions from scratch, and you don't mind downloading and installing your own DB2 client, then Zend Core for IBM may not be for you.

But it will save a lot of people a lot of time. Like I said -- the whole package is free, it never times out, and it's an easy way to get up and running with PHP and DB2 (or Derby, or Cloudscape) on Linux or AIX. And if you decide you want support, you can get it from Zend (for the PHP bits) or IBM (for the Cloudscape bit).