Platform services like Heroku and AppEngine have been well-known for the last few years and many companies have been using them successfully in their business. They are more attractive to startups, due to low initial cost and smaller headaches involved in setup. 2011 was a great year for platform services, with the emergence of many platform services and a new trend for supporting multiple languages instead of supporting a single language. [...] Here, I will go through two of the PHP platform services I have experimented with: PHPFog and Pagoda Box.

He talks about each of the options and looks at several key elements of each including the deployment process, scalability, monitoring tools, offerings for caching and the database management utilities bundled with the application. Both services offer a "free instance" for you to try out their services, so give them both a try and see what you think.

The PHP London user group's sixth annual PHP UK Conference is a full-day event of lectures and networking for web developers and managers at the Business Design Centre in central London on Friday 25 February 2011. Enter now, and possibly win a registration to this exciting event, worth £130!

The drawing will end on February 14th so be sure to put your name in for a chance to win a pass. Talks being presented at this year's event include topics such as advanced OOP patterns, frameworks, continuous improvement, NoSQL, Amazon EC2 and Xdebug. You can find out more about the conference in general on the PHP UK website.

According to Zend , the exam covers the following topics: PHP Basics, Functions, Data Format & Types, Web Features, Object Oriented Programming, Security, I/O, Strings and Patterns, Databases and Arrays. I will detail each topic as to what you should expect at the exam, however I will first tell you some basic information about the exam. Then I will tell you about the three most important changes of PHP 5.3 and another new feature I find very useful.

He starts with a few of the basics of the exam (how many questions, his testing strategy, the number of fill-in-the-blank questions) before moving into each of the topics. It's not an exhaustive description of each, but it gives you a good idea of where to start when studying. There's lots of links to resources for each that'll take you to some great places to learn in more detail.

Summer is upon us, which means that the annual Zend/PHP Conference (ZendCon), the world's largest gathering of the PHP community, is drawing near. Preparations are already in high gear, and you can make an impact on what fellow PHPers will wear in Fall of 2010! Submit your cool t-shirt designs or just cast your vote. The winning design will be used for the new 'official' PHP t-shirt. Every ZendCon attendee (and some others) will be getting the free t-shirt, and you get a free pass to the conference!

Besides the ticket to ZendCon, there's also two other prizes for the runners up - a free pass for a Zend Certification Exam (5.3) and a pass for a Zend Framework Certification Exam. There's about seven weeks left to submit your design and are currently eight entries on the list, so get your design in early to give it the best chance for the most votes. The submission round will end September 30th, so get your designs in soon!

As previously announced, Zend held a contest here to give away 5 free tickets to ZendCon 2009 to 5 deserving User Groups. It's now time for the announcements of who won! [...] To the end, the following groups are being chosen to each receive a free ticket, and they will get an email from me to start processing that soon.

The five groups that will be receiving their free pass are:

• Austin PHP Meetup
• Chicago PHP User Group
• Burlington, VT PHP Users Group
• PHPBenelux
• PHPWomen

Congrats to the winning groups! For all others, you can still get in on the early bird rates as long as you order before August 28th (plus there's all sorts of other discounts). Check out the registration page for more information.

Zend and S&S support local PHP user groups, and will be providing a limited number of free ZendCon passes for user groups to distribute to active members who might not have the financial wherewithal otherwise.

There'll be five passes handed out to user groups - one to each of the five selected groups. To enteryour user group, get one of the organizers to submit a bit of information about the group and reasons why they think the group should be given a pass. Full details on what needs to be sent and where to set it all off to can be found in the full post. Good luck!

As it stands, I've shocked more than my share of people in the past when I've mentioned my stance on certifications for programmers. Specifically, when I have a pile of resumes in front of me, and I'm giving them an initial pass to sort them apart, I take any that mention their programming certifications, and sort them to the bottom.

He justification is that most of the certifications out there are pretty much useless and that, from his experience, those that list them on their resume are using it to appear more qualified.

So what is it that's so wrong with the certifications in the first place? Simply put, they prove nothing to me. They only prove that you could cram and pass a multiple choice test.

But, as he notes, programming is more about art than knowing the order of the arguments in str_replace. He illustrates his other point, "passing - yes but by how much?" with how the Zend Certified Engineer exam is handled. You get a pass or fail and you only know what you didn't do so well on if you fail.

Here's the contest. [Below]you will see a Flash player queued up to play a 30 second commercial for ZendCon. Near the end of the video is a panel that says "and of course..." I'm looking for the best, ZendCon related answer to the answer to the panel, "and of course..." (you will understand after you've watched it) Witty, poignant, silly, creative, none of these describe the ones I was able to come up with, so let's see you try.

The one submission that takes the cake will win first prize, the ticket to ZendCon and five runners up will receive a free license for a copy of Zend Studio. Entering is easy - submit your entry by sending an email off to contest@zend.com