If you're a PHP developer and are working on distributed applications (or might be in the future), you should probably read through this new article on PHPMaster.com with 8 common fallacies about these applications and their needs.

These fallacies directly relate to us as PHP developers since we build distributed applications each and every day. We build mashups, applications that interact with SOAP and REST services, authenticate users via Facebook, Google, or Twitter APIs, retrieve information from remote databases and caching services, etc. Make no mistake, we're building distributed computer applications. Given that we are building distributed applications, it's important that we understand the eight fallacies and how they affect us.

Among the list of their fallacies are things like:

• The Network is Reliable
• Bandwidth is Infinite
• The Network is Secure
• There is One Administrator

Check out the full article for the rest of them and summaries of each.

On DeveloperWorld today there's a new article talking about performance concerns and PHP application (and how your data source might be the problem).

The power of PHP and an RDBMS is the ability to nail the major features of an application with cheaply paid developers in a record amount of time. Unfortunately, the default runtime environment used by PHP is simply an unscalable mess. [...] The truth is that if you have enough servers and enough database servers, you don't have contention. [...] As it turns out, there's a modern solution to the problem: the cloud plus NoSQL. Cloud infrastructure gives us the ability to spin up enough servers, and a NoSQL database enables us to shard our data effectively.

They talk some about why they think PHP's runtine environment is "a dog" based on the non-native pooling of database connections and the lack of a thread-safe environment.

The bottom line: PHP applications are a load on the database due to the constraints of the concurrency model.

He points to the cloud architecture and NoSQL databases as solutions to the scalability problem, providing more scalable resources and flexible data sources.

On the PHPFog blog there's a recent post explaining their service in a bit more detail and how it provides the PHP applications out there with a huge amount of scalability that a traditional virtual server can't.

PHP Fog is a new type of hosting provider for PHP applications developers to build applications the good old-fashioned way but with easy scaling, reliability, speed, and easy deployment/management compared to traditional shared/dedicated hosting.

They look at a few situations where scalability can play a key role - traffic surge, growth leads to performance degradation and underutilized servers - and how the answers to these issues are best described as "scaling up", "scaling out" or scaling down", all things that more traditional hosting doesn't do well. Cloud-based platforms, like PHPFog (or Orchestra) can give you that high availability you need, so no matter the situation.

In this new article on the Zend Developer Zone, Wil Sinclair has made a "forecast" of sorts as to the role that PHP could be playing in cloud computing in the future.

There are three kinds of services that are commonly associated with the cloud: Software as a Service (SaaS), Platform as a Service (PaaS) and Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS). Software as a Service has gotten a lot of good press in the past few years, as Salesforce and the like have seen adoption from the smallest shops to the largest corporations.

He points to Platform as a Service as the most likely target for PHP (like the Google App Engine). He also points out some of the other providers for the other types (SaaS, IaaS) like Salesforce, Mosso, Amazon Web Services and Rackspace CloudServers. He digs into a bit more detail on the IaaS services, describing how they work (complete with a fun image) and how your application would fit inside.

On the Ibuildings techPortal today Vito Chin has posted a new article dealing with PHP and "the Cloud" - where the popular web language fits into the move towards cloud computing.

Cloud computing refers to the utilization of shared, elastic resources and processing power accessed via the Internet. In some ways, it hails the reversion to the golden age of time-sharing but with significant improvements to the distribution philosophies underlying the delivery infrastructure. [...] Cloud-based development involves in some sense, the outsourcing, of various parts of the application out of the server and into the cloud.

Included is an illustration of how an application would interact with the cloud and an example of working with the S3 service that Amazon offers. The example mentions both the normal services and something called the "elastic compute cloud" that lets you use remote services to run virtual instances of other operating systems.