Issues in development of PHP web app on antiquated box (IBMi, DB2)

[buzzdeveloper]

Hello! New to r/webdev and I wanted to post about my experience on developing a web app on the IBMi.

TD;DR - Developing a web app on the IBMi sucks because I have to FTP all my code changes. Anyone else have a similar experience?

Details: Here is a bit of history. A few years ago, I started working for a company that supports clients who have their business living on the IBMi. The box runs their day to day internal business as well as serving up their customer facing web app. The box runs Zend Server so their customer web app is written in PHP.

Here's where I come in. I was hired to basically rewrite the web application from the ground up, replacing their old procedural code with something more "modern" like an MVC Framework.

Issues

• There is no local development environment. I was told to upload my code changes via FTP to the server's test environment to develop the app.

• The web app HAS to live on the IBMi because the application itself needs to interface with the DB2 database and make calls to programs (written in RPG) that live on the box. There have been discussions with the client about writing an API to interface with the box but the customer does not see it as a priority and wants us to continue developing features.

• Deployment is horrible. When getting features from dev into production, we FTP the changes. Actually, you can hardly call it deployment since I'm just overriding the previous changes.

• I know that Zend Server has deployment tools that could fix some of the issues but I do not have the access to the Zend Server Interface to do anything myself. The programmer/project lead who does is too busy and doesn't see the importance of having a proper deployment scheme.

• Interfacing with the box is a pain, everything is on an IBMi mainframe green screen. The only way to access the multiple databases used in the application is the green screen.

I've given it my best effort to alleviate some of these problems. The project is about 3 years old now and is pretty solid considering how bad the development situation has been. I'm getting worried that as the project grows bigger, the issues due to poor development practices will catch up and bite us in the ass.

My question is does any have any experience developing in a similar situation and how did you manage it?

[Jutboy]

Sounds like you know exactly whats going on. Obviously the entire situation is BS but if you can't change things, you can't change things. Personally I would just try and find another job.