Introducing the i7 Framework

"Oh no, yet another framework for PHP..."

Admit it: that was what you thought when you read the title, didn't you?

But rest assured, we haven't created a new framework.

But we did launch something.

For 7 years now, we've been working on ATK, and it has found its niche as a framework for developing business applications. Where some frameworks focus on providing components, and other frameworks focus on websites, ATK has more and more focussed on business apps: these internal applications that companies use to run their business. (And also often as an easy-to-build administrative backend to some webapplications).

ATK typically lives on an internal Linux or Windows server in an office or corporate environment.

This year, a specific set of circumstances led to a whole new market for the framework.

The most important in this respect was the release of Zend Core for IBM's System-i. "System i" may be relatively unknown in the PHP community, but it's the new name (they change it every few years) of what was once called the AS400, and if that doesn't ring a bell, it's the big machines that run all these enterprise 'green screen' environments of large retailers, factories etc.

Zend Core basically brings native PHP to the System i world. This means that PHP is now a valid alternative to Java, when modernizing all these enterprise applications, and creating a web frontend for them.

The fun thing is: about 90% of the apps running on System i are business applications. Data management, data flows, workflows, business processes. Things that ATK is good at.

So this provides a great opportunity for the framework.

The operating system running on System-i is called 'i5/OS', so the calculation we did was:

i5 + PHP + ATK = i7

Corny, granted; but giving it a new name (which seems to be relevant in the IBM world) gives us the possibility to make this a separate product range. i7 basically is ATK for i5, with native i5 drivers, and an extensive support package. For some reasons, in the big blue IBM world, 'free software' is considered evil, so we had to add a support package in order to be taken seriously.

The past 2 days, we have presented "the i7 Framework for System-i" at the System-i Expo in the Netherlands. We did 2 sessions of 50 minutes demonstrating the framework to IT managers, most of which hadn't even heard of PHP yet. And the results are promising. Not only for our little framework, but also for PHP in general.

Info on the i7 framework can be found at i7.nl. Currently in Dutch (because of time pressure before the Expo), but an international version will follow soon.