The Amazon Web Services group has recently released an updated version of their SDK for PHP and at it's heart is the open source project Guzzle (a HTTP client framework).

The new SDK is built on top of the Guzzle HTTP client framework, which provides increased performance and enables event-driven customization. Each AWS service client extends the Guzzle client and describes operations on the service using a service description file. The SDK now manages persistent connections for both serial and parallel requests. It detects transient network failures, with automatic retries using truncated exponential backoff. Support for event hooks (via the Symfony2 EventDispatcher) allows you to implement custom, event-driven behavior.

In the AWS post about the update, they give you a few code snippets showing this updated version in use. This completely reworked version of the SDK is not compatible with the previous version, so you'll need to consult their migration guide to bring things up to date.

For most PHP developers, when they hear "compile from source" they automatically assume that the person talking means they're working with a unix variant-based system. In this new tutorial from PHPMaster.com, though, they show how to "compile from source" on a different platform - Windows.

Those working in a Windows environment are more likely to download and install PHP from precompiled packages. And while I don't disagree it's easier to use a precompiled solution, even on Unix systems, there are some advantages that can come with compiling a binary from source. [...] But be forewarned: compiling can be a frustrating task, especially on Windows! You must ensure your build environment is set up correctly, learn how to use the compiler and other build tools properly, and satisfy any library dependencies. Hopefully this article is your first step in overcoming many of these obstacles.

The tutorial walks you through the steps you'll need to take to get your environment set up, including the tools you'll need to be able to perform the compile (including Microsoft's Visual C++ Express and the Windows Software Development Kit). Screenshots and commands are all included in the post to make the compile work. There's even a few instructions on compiling in the extensions you might need.

On DZone.com there's a recent post from Giorgio Sironi looking at running Selenium tests on the Android platform via the PHPUnit Selenium interface.

Testing web applications is not only based on unit and functional tests for the server-side (PHP, Java) and client-side (JavaScript) components, but also on end-to-end tests like the ones performed with Selenium. Selenium is capable of driving a real browser like Firefox in the same way a user would do, letting you express a test with a series of page to load, element selections, clicks and typed characters. [...] In this tutorial, we'll experiment with the Android Driver and set up a couple of tests to run inside an Android virtual device.

He walks you through the basic setup of an Android environment (based on the Android SDK) and how to start up the Android driver installed from the Selenium site. An example test is included, showing how to make a request for a test page and checking its title as well as checking that the input from the "keyboard" is successful.

In his most recent blog post Michael Nitschinger introduces you to Couchbase, a document-oriented database, and how to use it with PHP.

As there were a lot of merges, renamings and releases, it was pretty hard to follow up with the current/best database version and SDK to use for your project. Now as the dust has settled a bit, here's what I've come up with: Couchbase 2.0 will be the next major version and is already pretty stable, so I'll jump straight onto it and skip 1.8.

He recommends using the php-couchbase libraries or the php-ext-couchbase extension. He walks you through the whole process of getting Couchbase installed and running and the PHP support installed via the aptitude package manager. A sample script and some basic usage information is also included.

On the NetTuts.com site today they have a (very complete) guide to help you wrangle the Facebook Graph API and make it useful for your application. It makes use of the official Facebook PHP SDK to interface with the Graph API.

Have you ever wanted to learn how to make your applications more social with Facebook? It's much easier than you think! In this tutorial, we'll be building an application that reads and publishes data to and from Facebook using Facebook's Graph API.

The tutorial helps you get signed up on the Facebook developer site, create a first sample application, set up the SDK and make a simple page (with an added bonus of using the Twitter Boostrap for look/feed). There's a section covering permissions, what kind of data you can expect publicly for both users and posts. They wrap it up with an example of posting back to Facebook though the API and updating the status on your account. The complete code for the tutorial is also available for download.

On the CloudSpring site today there's the continuation of a previous article about RackSpace's CloudFiles API. In this new post they show how to use their PHP SDK to connect to and use the CloudFiles service.

Rackspace provides a Software Development Kit (SDK) for multiple programming languages. They store their PHP SDK on GitHub. The PHP SDK requires PHP 5 with the following modules: cURL, FileInfo and mbstring. In this tutorial we are going to review use of the PHP SDK with CloudFiles. Not all parts of the API will be covered but you will get a great start.

Code is included showing how to make the connection, work with containers, pushing content out to a CDN, object handling and a few other handy tips (and API info) to help you along your way.

Maarten Balliauw has a new post announcing the release of the latest Windows SDK for Azure for PHP, version 4.

The Windows Azure SDK 4 contains some significant feature enhancements. For example, it now incorporates a PHP library for accessing Windows Azure storage, a logging component, a session sharing component and clients for both the Windows Azure and SQL Azure Management API's. On top of that, all of these API's are now also available from the command-line both under Windows and Linux. This means you can batch-script a complete datacenter setup including servers, storage, SQL Azure, firewalls, ... If that's not cool, move to the North Pole.

He includes a few things from the changelog including service management API support for SQL Azure, package scaffolders and various performance enhancements. You can find out more about the release and the latest on the project on the Microsoft Interoperability website.

In this new post Maarten Balliauw looks at a "hidden gem" in the Windows Azure SDK for PHP - the ability to create scripts to work with command-line scripts - the Microsoft_Console_Command class.

Usually when creating a command line script you would parse $_SERVER['argv'], validate values and check whether required switches are available or not. With the Microsoft_Console_Command class from the Windows Azure SDK for PHP, you can ease up this task. Let's compare writing a simple "hello" command.

He compares the two sides of making a PHP command-line script: the "ugly way" using normal PHP code and $_SERVER['argv'] and the "easy way" using the Microsoft_Console_Command class that uses a class to define the functionality. There's also methods to grab specific arguments, pull from STDIN and get environment variables.

Maarten Balliauw has a new post to his blog today talking about a new feature they're considering adding to the SDK API - the ability scaffold and package up a PHP application for use on the Windows Azure platform.

With the fresh release of the Windows Azure SDK for PHP v3.0, it's time to have a look at the future. One of the features we're playing with is creating a full-fledged replacement for the current Windows Azure Command-Line tools available. These tools sometimes are a life saver and sometimes a big PITA due to baked-in defaults and lack of customization options. And to overcome that last one, here's what we're thinking of: scaffolders. Basically what we'll be doing is splitting the packaging process into two steps: Scaffolding and Packaging.

He goes through their current suggestions of how to set up the scaffold template that would auto-generate everything you need from a command-line call. He also talks about making custom scaffolds (that are, in concept, similar to phar archives) and gives an example of the simple structure.

In a recent post to his blog Brian Swan shows you how to use the Storage Emulator for Azure with PHP via their provided SDK. It's a quick post but it has a helpful code snippet if you've been struggling with getting it set up.

This is a short post to address this question: How do I use the local Storage Emulator (formerly known as Development Storage) when using the Windows Azure SDK for PHP? The Windows Azure Command Line Tools for PHP provide an option for running an application locally in the Compute Emulator, but I didn't see an option for using the local Storage Emulator. As it turns out, the answer is very simple, although somewhat difficult to find.

The trick is to omit the constructor parameters when creating a new table/blob/client to get it to create things locally instead of on your Azure instance. He also includes a set of links that can help fill in some of the gaps in the whole Windows Azure deployment process.