PHP’s Evolution On The IBM i Platform Continues
September 28, 2026 Alex Woodie
PHP was one of the first open source languages and runtimes to come to IBM i way back in the early 2000s. More than two decades later, open source is thriving on IBM i with hundreds of projects, while PHP is considered a hardened, enterprise-grade language for modern Web applications. This fall will see at least one new release of PHP coming to IBM i, version 8.6, and perhaps more.
We are all indebted to the early backers of PHP on the IBM i platform, who saw the potential for the open-source project to evolve into the sturdy business language trusted by Fortune 100 enterprises that it is today. Big Blue took a chance with Zend (now part of Perforce) to port the language and runtime to the platform and the operating system, which were then known as System i and i5/OS, respectively.
That bet paid off, as PHP became an early example of how the proprietary IBM i platform could embrace and benefit from the large investments the developer community was making in open source software. Today, Python and Node.JS today are surging on IBM i. According to the latest IBM i Marketplace Study by Fortra, 28 percent of IBM i developers use Python (three percentage points behind Java) while 19 percent report using Google’s Node.JS. Usage of PHP has dropped from its highs above 30 percent in the 2010s to 16 percent today, the same as COBOL.
Languages used to develop new applications on IBM i. (Source: 2026 IBM i Marketplace Survey by Fortra)
Would Python and Node.JS be as popular on the platform without PHP breaking the open source trail? It’s debatable. What’s not debatable is that PHP today continues to provide a solid framework upon which to build reliable, secure, and performant IBM i applications. And the PHP language continues to get better every year.
The PHP community is currently gearing up to ship PHP version 8.6 by the end of 2026, with a slim possibility for a version 8.7 to ship before we all sing Auld Lang Syne. We recently caught up with Seiden Group founder Alan Seiden, who is responsible for one of two PHP distributions for IBM i available on the market, called Seiden PHP+ (the other distribution is Perforce’s ZendPHP for IBM i) to talk about version 8.6.
“It’s not a major change,” Seiden told IT Jungle. “PHP is part of the enterprise, and it’s meant to have gradual improvements, keeping the business safe. These are not the wild, crazy days of 20, 25 years ago. The PHP community is very communicative and transparent about what’s being delivered in each release. The features are discussed well in advance so the community has a chance to prepare for it.”
The enhancements in PHP 8.6 that are exciting Seiden revolve around improvements to debugging. In fact, one of Seiden Group’s employees is responsible for contributing a significant enhancement to the PHP project.
“Calvin Buckley from my team made one of the features, which was to make debugging easier,” Seiden said. “It shows more information. It actually shows which parameters came in that caused the error.”
Currently, PHP doesn’t consistently report details around errors. With version 8.6, when an error occurs, PHP will show the developer what parameters in the JSON string were actually passed to the function when that function raises an error.
“This makes it easier to see at a glance what may have failed, and help narrow down debugging,” Buckley wrote in his PHP wiki article titled Display Function Arguments in Errors.
Seiden said this enhancement will not only make life easier for human programmers, but also for any AI agents that are interacting with the PHP code, too.
“What I’ve noticed is that many of the enhancements out there, including in PHP, are for human beings,” he said. “But if you think about it, giving more information about errors and issues also allows AI to make automatic fixes as well.”
PHP 8.6 will also bring security improvements, including more secure session defaults. According to Seiden, these settings will “help reduce common risks such as session fixation, stolen cookies through JavaScript, and some cross-site request forgery scenarios,” he writes in a recent blog post.
This release also brings performance improvements, including faster JSON encoding of arrays of objects, as well as performance enhancement to “PHP_JSON_PRETTY_PRINT,” which “prettifies” output to make it easier for humans to read.
Alan Seiden is the principal of Seiden Group.
The current active releases of PHP that are being actively developed by the broader PHP community are PHP 8.4 and 8.5. The community has committed to develop security fixes for PHP 8.3 through the end of 2027 and for PHP 8.2 through the end of 2026.
In the IBM i world, users are on a wide range of PHP releases, going back to version 7 and even version 5 (the PHP community famously skipped version 6; if you’re curious to know why, Miguel Hernández provides a good explanation).
Seiden Group currently has a beta release of the version 8.6 release of Seiden PHP+. Anyone on the version 8.2 release of Seiden PHP+ should be thinking about upgrading to a newer release.
“A major reason to keep enhancing these, aside from whatever improvements are in each release, is to stay on top of things so you don’t fall behind,” he says. “If you wait too long, then you’re out of security compliance and you have a bigger job to catch up. I suggest going to a new minor release once a year or so.”
The PHP community has become more strict in recent releases about coding errors. Bad coding practices that were allowed to fly in the past are now being flagged. With the upcoming release of PHP 9.0, certain bad coding practices may no longer be tolerated, Seiden says.
“When version 9 comes out, whenever that is, that might have breaking changes potentially,” he said. “But they try not to have any breaking changes on the minor releases, like 8.5, 8.6, and so on. They’re just warnings. The releases have warnings to tell people what’s going to change in the future.”
The good news is that progress with AI makes it easier to detect these coding errors and correct them. A knowledgeable developer equipped with an AI coding agent, whether it’s Bob or Claude or some other tool, can make those changes and upgrade to a new release of PHP much faster, Seiden says.
“AI is very knowledgeable about PHP and can help people find those older coding structures that they need to update for newer versions of PHP,” Seiden said. “People who let it go and didn’t upgrade before – now is the time.”
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