According to a new press release on the Oracle.com site today, they've announced the company's investment in the popular PaaS provider (and big sponsor of several PHP conferences, events and the community) Engine Yard. From the official press release:

Oracle announced today that it has made a strategic minority investment in Engine Yard, a leading cloud development platform that supports Ruby, PHP and Node.js, popular web development languages. [...] In conjunction with this investment, Oracle and Engine Yard expect to work closely together to provide cloud application developers with a greater choice of development and deployment options. The two companies are expected to connect their respective PaaS offerings to enable more rapid development of applications in a secure, reliable and scalable environment.

No word yet on how this will integrate with Oracle's own cloud solutions but it should be interesting to see what comes out of it. Congratulations to the Engine Yard folks on the investment!

In the latest episode of their "Cloud Out Loud" podcast series, Elizabeth NAramore of Engine Yard interviews Keith Casey about his role as an evangelist at Twilio.

They talk some about working at Twilio and Keith's role there, some about the Austin (Texas) technology scene that he participates in and a bit about the currently-happening TwilioCon that's running in San Francisco. There's also a mention of a conference that Elizabeth is involved in that's happening in November in Indianapolis, CodeConnexx (put on by the PHP Women group).

You can listen to this latest episode either through the in-page player or by downloading the mp3. If you'd like this and more great episodes, think about subscribing to their feed.

Engine Yard/Orchestra, a PHP platform-as-a-service (PaaS) provider has announced the release of PHP 5.4 as a part of their cloud offerings:

We're pleased to announce the general availability of PHP 5.4 for Orchestra PHP Cloud. We are committed to keeping your apps running on the latest and greatest version of PHP. After careful lab testing, we'll upgrade your apps as newer versions of PHP become available. What if you're still using PHP 5.3? Don't worry, Orchestra PHP Cloud will continue to maintain its PHP 5.3 stack. You will be able to choose which version of PHP you would like to use when you launch a new app.

The default when you set up a new application will now be PHP 5.4, so be sure you're paying attention on setup if you need something else. You can find out more about the Orchestra PaaS on the Engine Yard site and try it out for free to see how your app performs.

Engine Yard has posted their latest "Chicks That Rip" podcast episode, hosted by Elizabeth Naramore - an interview with Beth Tucker Long, the Editor of php|architect magazine. This podcast highlights women in technology in multiple communities across the web.

In the interview they talk about Beth and the work she does for php|architect, what her own favorite part of the job is and how she manages the responsibilities of working and being a parent at the same time.

You can listen to this latest episode either by using the in-page player, downloading the mp3 or by subscribing to their feed.

For those that have heard about the Lithium PHP framework but haven't gotten a chance to get into it, Engine Yard is hosting a webinar just for you. Nate Abele, one of the core developers for the framework, will be presenting an introduction to the framework on July 26th.

Lithium is a framework for PHP 5.3+ that is focused on quality, speed, and flexibility. It's a set of no-nonsense philosophies and tools that enable you to build better applications, in less time, without sacrificing quality or extensibility. Lithium understands distributed storage and caching, queuing systems, micro-dispatch frameworks, with integrated support for document oriented databases like CouchDB and MongoDB, alongside relational databases like MySQL and PostgreSQL. Lithium's architecture allows you to get your application up and running quickly, and still allows you to take control of the framework to support the requirements of your application.

If you're interested, you can sign up for the webcast on the Engine Yard site. The event happens July 26th at 10am PST.

The folks over at Engine Yard have launched a new PHP-related effort to try to do their part to help out PHP user groups all over the world - a new program that aims to provide user groups with support via a direct link with their leaders.

Since Engine Yard was formed, we've had a deep commitment to supporting the open source community. [...] What was missing, though, was a more organized way to reach out to PHP User Groups to offer our support. We didn't really have a consistent way to connect with user group leaders. That's why we're starting a PHP User Group Program.

User group leaders that sign up will get a monthly email describing the benefits available to your group, a list of upcoming events or conferences your attendees might be interested in as well as information on getting occasional swag/sponsorship for your group.

We'll also be highlighting a PHP User Group of the month, which will entail a blog post about your group, a visit from us and some extra special goodies for your members.

If you're a user group leader, you can get involved by signing up here and you'll be notified when you've been added.

The Voices of the ElePHPant podcast has posted a new interview with a member of the PHP community. This time its Davey Shafik, an engineer at EngineYard (with their PHP PaaS Orchestra).

• You work on a project called FRAPI, give a summary of it
• With PHP and Ruby both in the same environment, talk about the cultural issues with the integration of the two communities
• You write as well as speak, tell us some about that (and what you're working on now)

You can listen to this latest episode either using the in-page player, by subscribing to their feed and get the latest.

According to this new post on the EngineYard blog, they've decided to become the official sponsor behind the Lithium PHP framework, a project that's been going for several years but just hasn't seen the adoption of other frameworks that are PHP 5.3-centric.

We are proud to announce that Engine Yard is now the first official sponsor of the open source project, the Lithium PHP framework. We believe that Lithium holds a great deal of promise and we want to help it reach its full potential. Therefore, not only are we pledging our financial support, we will be working together to promote the framework to our customers and partners and the community at large through conferences, meetups and webcasts.

The post names some of the core development team (including Garrett Woodworth and Nate Abele) and suggests following the Lithium and EngineYard twitter accounts for future details.

EngineYard, a company that recently merged with the PHP platform as a service provider Orchestra.io, has a new live panel podcast about the Future of PHP, specifically involving PEAR and Pyrus.

If you are a PHP developer using PEAR and Pyrus, we invite you to join us this week as we explore the future of PEAR and Pyrus. We'll be discussing issues such as where PEAR/Pyrus will be going in the next few years, what obstacles may be on the horizon, and how they're going to get where they're going.

The live panel, hosted by Elizabeth Naramore, will include experts from the two projects: David Coallier (President), Helgi Þormar Þorbjörnsson, Brett Bieber, and Till Klampäckel. There's still time to sign up to attend - the show happens on November 17th. To put your name in to be a part of the event, fill in the info here and you'll be sent more information about attending.