Re: HipHop for PHP

[Aaron Bartell <aaronbartell@xxxxxxxxx>]

As it is with any business, you look to justify all costs and that includes
marketing in the way of creating partnerships.  In the case of eBay and Sun
I am guessing eBay got a swell deal on hardware+software, and IBM would have
to do the same for Facebook to get them to even try the machine.

Could IBM do that long term for many sites? No.  It would have to be purely
a marketing move to prove a point.

Regardless of whether IBM did something like this, it would be interesting
to to see if Facebook could be convinced that PHP runs better on the IBMi
with DB2 vs. on Linux with ??? (what is Facebook's database?).  Note that
running PHP on IBMi isn't as integrated as running RPG on the IBMi.  I say
that because Facebook could probably care less about things like job
management, OS400 logging, OS400 user profile security, etc.  That's the
problem with trying to sell the IBMi as a platform for languages that
operate in a VM above the OS - it just isn't taking advantage of as much as
a native approach.  Sure DB2 is great, but it is only as good as the ODBC
connection.

Aaron Bartell
http://mowyourlawn.com
http://mowyourlawn.com/blog/


On Tue, Feb 9, 2010 at 9:08 AM, <MattLavinder@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

> OK- this brings up an interesting point.  How could IBM convince Facebook
> (or anyone using the LAMP stack) to switch to Power and choose IBM i over
> AIX/Linux ?  Personally, I think that is the major problem IBM i faces.
> While IBM i having MySQL and PHP are great things, it sort of causes the
> system to start loosing its identity.  Not sure Facebook would care that
> there's an integrated databases or all the other things the faithful think
> make IBM i great.  If it turns out the only way to get someone to use IBM i
> is to pay them...then we have a problem.
>
> Matt