Next Tuesday night we’re excited to have WebSphere guru Roland Barcia introduce the latest PHP and Web 2.0 capabilities in IBM’s WebSphere sMash environment (built on Project Zero) to the New York PHP community:

IBM WebSphere sMash is a platform for developing and running agile Web applications using scripting languages and Web 2.0 technologies such as RESTful Web services, JavaScript Object Notation, and Atom and RSS feeds.

It supports the Groovy language, familiar to Java programmers, and PHP for access to thousands of PHP applications and libraries,and the huge PHP developer community.

IBM WebSphere sMash is focused on significant improvement in time-to-value for Situational Applications and Mashups.

Partners and community have found that by combining PHP applications and libraries with new code written in PHP or Groovy for the IBM WebSphere sMash platform, they can achieve significant reduction in development time for Situational Applications and Mashups.

We cover an overview of the PHP support in IBM WebSphere sMash and the support for generating new PHP code before exploring more detailed scenarios demonstrating PHP applications being extended, integrated and mashed up.

The presentation comes on the heels of the latest WebSphere sMash v1.1.0.1 release that includes PHP performance improvements and the new PHP to Groovy bridge (call Groovy classes from PHP).

Here’s a little background on how sMash relates to Project Zero (you can find more info on the about page):

• Project Zero experimental builds (latest are named LeMans and Sebring). Includes the latest/greatest functional enhancements, tools, and bug fixes that haven’t yet made it into the generally available product. No-charge for development and limited deployments. Support via the Project Zero community.
• WebSphere sMash Developer Edition – includes tooling as well as the stable, production-ready runtime. No-charge for development and limited deployments. Support via the Project Zero community.
• WebSphere sMash – same stable, production-ready runtime as WebSphere sMash Developer Edition, but warranted & licensed for full production deployments. Available for purchase from IBM. Support available via the Project Zero community and 24×7x365 voice & electronic IBM support included with each new license purchase.

On a personal level, I’m excited to learn more about the PHP capabilities at this meeting first hand. I had a chance to work with sMash recently on an internal situational application that aggregated several Web services with differing APIs into one interface. It used Groovy however, not PHP.

Here’s the official write up for that project. I hope it gives you a good feel for how you can integrate all sorts of tools and services into a single app using sMash:

The application is built on WebSphere sMash with Groovy beans that are wired to Groovy scripts acting in response to RESTful events from the UI. Service and ServiceResult interfaces abstract the actual service transport, request and response format into a common API. The mashup stores configuration and user profile data in an Apache Derby database. The user interface is based on standard w3 XHTML templates. Asynchronous requests from the view to the controller are handled by the Dojo Toolkit. Pie charts are rendered by the Google Chart API. Normalization of HTML to XML is performed by NekoHTML and Xerces.

WebSphere sMash / Project Zero provides an ideal platform for this type of application, as its HTTP Connection API, XML processing capability, simplified dependency resolution for Apache Derby and the Dojo Toolkit, and simple ZIP file import / export mechanism (for the app code and database) make situational application development quick and easy to deploy.

There’s also a slew of articles on developerWorks to learn about writing apps for sMash. In particular, Introducing IBM WebSphere sMash, Part 1: Build RESTful services for your Web application is a good place to start.

Back to the NYPHP meeting, please make sure you RSVP at least 24 hours in advance, by 6pm ET on Monday, April 27th for the meeting Tuesday night.

Hope to see you there!