April 28th, 2009

It's April and spring is here (or at least it's supposed to be). So it's time to take a RESTful break from the monotony and join our IBM crew as we welcome Roland Barcia, IBM Senior Technical Staff Member and published expert on Web 2.0 technologies. Be sure to join us and get sMash'd with all the latest in the need-to-know world of Web 2.0, WebSphere, and PHP.

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.

Roland Barcia is a Senior Technical Staff Member (STSM) and Lead Web 2.0 Architect within IBM Software Services for WebSphere. He is the coauthor of the book IBM WebSphere: Deployment and Advanced Configuration. He has published over 40 articles and papers on topics such as Java Persistence, Ajax, REST, JavaServer Faces, and Messaging Technologies. He frequently presents at conferences and customers on various technologies. He has spent the past 10 years implementing middleware systems on various platforms, including Sockets, CORBA, Java EE, SOA, and most recently the Web 2.0[nd]based platform called Project Zero. He has a Masters Degree in Computer Science from the New Jersey Institute of Technology. Roland maintains a blog called Web 2.0 and Middleware.