IBM® Informix® is a low-administration, easy-to-use, and embeddable database that is ideal for application development. It supports a wide range of development platforms, such as Java™, .NET, PHP, and web services, enabling developers to build database applications in the language of their choice. Informix is designed to handle RDBMS data and XML without modification and can be extended easily to handle new data sets.

This IBM Redbooks® publication provides fundamentals of Informix application development. It covers the Informix Client installation and configuration for application development environments. It discusses the skills and techniques for building Informix applications with Java, ESQL/C, OLE DB, .NET, PHP, Ruby on Rails, DataBlade®, and Hibernate.

The book uses code examples to demonstrate how to develop an Informix application with various drivers, APIs, and interfaces. It also provides application development troubleshooting and considerations for performance.

This book is intended for developers who use IBM Informix for application development. Although some of the topics that we discuss are highly technical, the information in the book might also be helpful for managers or database administrators who are looking to better understand their Informix development environment.

Chapter 1. Introduction to IBM Informix

Chapter 2. Setting up an Informix development environment

Chapter 3. Working with the ODBC driver

Chapter 4. Working with ESQL/C

Chapter 5. Working with the JDBC drivers

Chapter 6. IBM Informix with Hibernate

Chapter 7. Working with IBM Informix OLE DB Provider

Chapter 8. Working with .NET data providers

Chapter 9. Working with PHP

Chapter 10. User-defined routines

Chapter 11. Working with Ruby on Rails

Chapter 12. Informix 4GL Web Services

Chapter 13. Application development considerations

Appendix A. Parameters in the onconfig file

Appendix B. Accommodating distributed transactions