We've raved about the brilliance of Heroku before, mostly around the fact that it makes launching a Rails or Node app rather simple without having to configure your own server. But what if you want the same kind of freedom and speed of deployment with PHP? Fortunately, Heroku has quietly offered support for PHP for quite some time.

You'll need to get their CLI deployment tool and set up an account but the rest is pretty easy. The steps to set up the git repo, add a new "heroku" branch and push the checked in code directly out to the server.

While Heroku got its start from hosting Ruby on Rails applications, it nowadays supports many different environments in the Cedar stack. Node.js is what many use, but they also do support PHP. Dependency management is easy for Node.js applications as Heroku recognizes your package.json files and automatically installs the libraries needed via NPM.

Until now PHP developers haven't had this convenience, but as Composer is emerging as the default PHP package manager, I've now added support for it. Before the pull request gets accepted, Composer dependency handling can already be used by specifying my custom PHP buildpack when creating Heroku apps.

He shows you how to get it up and running with a sample application - creating the new git archive, creating the Heroku app with the custom backapack (and a "composer.json" file), setting up the main "index.php" file and push it all to Heroku. You can view his sample application here (a simple URL encoding form).

Cloud hosting is nothing new. Seeing as "cloud" is such a loosely used term some will consider their VPS solutions on Slicehost or Rackspace to be "cloud hosting". That is partially true, but this article covers how PHP is getting some serious attention in the PaaS (Platform as a Service) field. This year you will almost certainly find yourself making the decision wether or not to move some of your applications and services across to the cloud, and this article can hopefully help you work out why and how.

He talks a bit about how the idea compares with Ruby's Heroku hosting service and some of the benefits that come with it:

• Speedy deployments
• Security
• Scaling