Development and deployment of Web-based applications is one of the most common activities in today’s IT world. For development of Web applications a development stack, consisting of an operating system platform, Web server, database engine, and scripting language is often employed. With the advent of PHP on i5/OS V5R4 and OS/400 V5R3, iSeries and System i customers have a whole new way to skin the Web cat while keeping their favored back-end system right in the thick of things.

One of the most popular of these stacks is the LAMP stack, which stands for Linux, Apache, MySQL, and PHP. Since

Note: The code accompanying this article is available for download here.

Last week, I wrote about performance issues when parameters are passed to subprocedures. This week, I write about a similar matter. If a subprocedure returns a value to the caller (i.e., the subprocedure serves as a function), the computer has to store the returned value somewhere in memory. The fact that the system must allocate memory for returned values means that performance may be affected.

To test the performance of function subprocedures, I wrote two substring functions. The first one, SubString, works like the %SUBST built-in function

Long-time i5/OS and OS/400 administrators may think they know everything about full system backups (FSBs). However, there are several considerations to think about before performing an FSB, and IBM has recently slipped additional capabilities into the FSB process that you may not know about. So let’s take five minutes and meditate over the whys, whens, and hows of FSBs and how you can improve the backup process in your shop.

Why We FSB

Full system backups are performed as insurance for emergency situations, such as a total system crash or a full system recovery to another machine in the event