In this new post, Sameer Borate shows you how to use his Amazon BrowseNodes script to work with the returned data from the Amazon Advertising API.

The BrowseNodes tool automatically gets all the child BrowseNodes and their names. The program recursively traverses the BrowserNode hierarchy and returns all the BrowseNodes and their respective names. You can display the nodes on the console or save it to a CSV file. You can also include the library in your existing projects to process BrowseNodes.

You'll need curl support on your system to make it work. Several code examples are included showing how to grab a certain node, showing a list of nodes, saving the node information to a CSV, changing locales and getting the parent node for the current node.

On the php|architect site there's a recent tutorial from Cal Evans about building a transactional email system with the help of a simple library and the SES system from Amazon.

I love APIs. A well-defined API can make short work of a complex problem. It's even more fun when you find a cool API with a great wrapper to make it simple to use. That's what I found when I started playing with Amazon's Simple Email Service; a tool that was easy to work with, solved a problem I needed solved, and had a simple to use PHP wrapper.

Based on the SES library by Dan Meyers, he includes the code to pull in a simple email template and populate it with the values you want, log in to the Amazon SES service and send the email via the remote service.

On PHPMaster.com today there's a new tutorial showing you how to integrate Amazon's S3 service with your application via the Services_Amazon_S3 PEAR package.

In the process of reviewing documentation for Orchestra.io, I found that it doesn't allow file uploads. Instead, it's recommended that Amazon S3 be used for file hosting. If you aren't familiar with it, S3 is an online storage web service that is part of Amazon Web Services (AWS). It provides access to fairly cheap storage through a variety of web service interfaces. This article will demonstrate how to sign up for an Amazon S3 account and use PEAR's Services_Amazon_S3 package to interact with S3 in your own application.

They walk you through the whole process - getting signed up at the AWS site, creating credentials, installing the Services_Amazon_S3 package (via the PEAR installer) and using it in some sample scripts.

SitePoint's PHPMaster has a new post today, the third part of a series helping you get your application from "zero to cloud" on an Amazon EC2 setup. In this latest post they wrap things up by showing how to set up the full lamp stack on the remote server. Here's part one and two that lead up to this latest part.

This is the final article in a three part series focused on setting up EC2 as a sandbox for application developers. I assume you have an AWS account with Amazon; if you don't, please read Part 1 to learn how easy it is to sign up. I also assume you have configured your development environment and installed an AMI; if you haven't, please read Part 2. In this installment, we'll learn how to install Apache, MySQL and PHP in our running AMI, and then clone the AMI to make our own.

Included in the post are all the commands you'll need to get the packages installed for PHP, MySQL, Apache 2, PEAR and the PHP command line binary. With all of that installed, they show you how to create an AMI (Amazon Machine Image) to make it easier to scale in the future.

On NetTuts.com there's a new tutorial showing you how to deploy your WordPress blog to the cloud, more specifically to the cloud services Amazon offers.

For the last decade, hosting a large scale web application has been a daunting task, reserved only for experts. Not anymore; when Amazon opened its server architecture, everything changed. Computer hardware moved to the cloud, and became available to any and all developers. In this tutorial, we will install WordPress in the cloud.

They walk you through all the steps you'll need - from setting up an AWS account, starting up your first instance and installing the needed server software. It comes complete with screenshots. They also show you how to set up the database and how to pull down the latest WordPress and configure it for use.

Christoph Dorn has a new post today showing how to get the FirePHP tool to work together with Zend Server on an AWS instance to help make your debugging even simpler.

FirePHP can nicely complement the built-in tools available when using Zend Server and can be easily made available to all provisioned sites. This tutorial illustrates how to setup FirePHP 1.0 for all virtual hosts on a Zend Server AMI on Amazon EC2.

He steps you through the process of getting FirePHP installed and working in your browser as well as pulling the "firephp.phar" file in on the Zend Server side. Configuration is pretty simple - the lines for the Apache config are included and the JSON needed to make the credentials for FirePHP are too. A simple test script is created and an auth key is set and you should be up and running.

New on PHPBuilder.com today there's a tutorial from Jason Gilmore about running Zend Framework-based applications from the command line in a more hard-coded way than using Zend_Tool.

I regularly use an alternative application of PHP and I'm quite surprised that this capability remains relatively unknown. I'm referring to the ability to run PHP scripts from the command line using its command line interpreter (CLI). Even though it's been possible since the PHP 4.3.0 release, you may be completely unaware of this CLI usage unless you employ great tools such as PHPDoc, Phing, or PHPUnit. Running PHP scripts with CLI allows you to leverage your PHP language skills whenever you need to run scripts from the shell.

He talks about what the CLI functionality of PHP is and what it has to offer the developer. He then creates a few sample scripts so you can get a feel for how to write and run simple PHP CLI applications. Building on these examples, he creates a Zend Framework-based script that loads in the bootstrap, grabs configuration values and makes a connection to the Amazon Web Services.

On his blog today Kevin Schroeder has a quick post about an issue with the queue name when working with the Amazon SQS service.

I'm doing some work for a webinar and I figured out that if you want use AWS SQS in your app you need to specify not just the queue name, but the full URL. What is the full URL? It is what createQueue() returns.

His code example shows a "before" and "after" of using the createQueue method to make the correct queue name. You can find out more about the Amazon Simple Queue Service on the Amazon website. Additionally there's a PHP library to interface with it posted on the Amazon Web Services site.

On the Amazon Web Services blog there's a new post about the release of their new AWS SDK for PHP that use can use to directly access their web services features from your PHP applications.

The first release supports a large subset of our infrastructure services including the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), the Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3), Amazon CloudFront, Amazon CloudWatch, Amazon SimpleDB, the Amazon Simple Notification Service (SNS), the Amazon Simple Queue Service (SQS), as well as Amazon Identify and Access Management (IAM).

The SDK for PHP includes all of the libraries you'll need to directly access the mentioned services, some code examples to help you get started and some documentation to fill you in on some of the finer points. There's also a few code snippets included in the post to show you a sample SNS connection that creates a topic, subscribes to it and publishes a notification.

On SitePoint.com today there's a new guide posted about how to get a WordPress instance up and running on an Amazon EC2 instance and the Microsoft Web Platform.

One claim I often hear from web developers, especially those who offer website design and consulting services, is their need to quickly launch websites that run fast and give them total control of the server for maximum flexibility and scalability. This is a quick tutorial on how to do just that, with a guided tour on how to run WordPress on Amazon's EC2 Cloud and the Microsoft Web Platform. [...] WordPress and EC2 come together in a really slick way, giving you a super-fast blog or website in just a few minutes.

For those that don't already have an EC2 instance, he helps you get that set up first complete with an almost one-click install of a WordPress instance. With the help of the Web Platform Installer you can easily install not only WordPress but all of the other technology it needs to get running quickly. Screenshots accompany the tutorial descriptions to help make the whole process even simpler.