As a part of the move to git/github that the PHP project recently made, a reminder was posted that the PHP-GTK project has also migrated.

PHP-GTK is a PHP extension that enables you to write client-side cross-platform GUI applications. This is the first such extension of this kind and one of the goals behind it was to prove that PHP is a capable general-purpose scripting language that is suited for more than just Web applications.

The full source can be found and forked/cloned over on github and is just waiting for you to contribute!

In this new post to his blog Brian Swan shares the process that he and other Microsoft-ers went through to migrate a site off of a LAMP stack and over to one based on Windows Azure. They moved was the SAG awards website because of issues it had seen with outages and slow performance.

In many ways, the SAG Awards website was a perfect candidate for Windows Azure. The website has moderate traffic throughout most of the year, but has a sustained traffic spike shortly before, during, and after the awards show in January. [...] The main challenge that SAG Awards and Microsoft engineers faced in moving the SAG Awards website to Windows Azure was in architecting for a very high, sustained traffic spike while accommodating the need of SAG Awards administrators to frequently update media files during the awards show. Both intelligent use of Windows Azure Blob Storage and a custom module for invalidating cached pages when content was updated were key to delivering a positive user experience.

He walks you through each of the five steps (high-level, obviously) that they took in the migration:

• Export data
• Install Drupal on Windows
• Import data into SQL Azure
• Copy media files to Azure Blob Storage
• Package and Deploy Durpal

Each step comes with some explanation and descriptions of the commands and tools used during the process.

The announcement has finally come - the PHP project has officially moved to git!

The migration of the PHP source code from Subversion to Git is complete. You can clone or fork the source from our GitHub mirror, and we also now support pull requests made via GitHub. The source is also available via git.php.net, and full instructions on cloning the php-src tree can be found at php.net/git. One immediate benefit is that future PHP release tags will be signed by the PHP development team. We will be releasing GPG keys for verification purposes in the next few days. More information on the migration and the new workflow can be found at the Moving to Git FAQ on the PHP Wiki.

This move does not include the manuals yet, but that's coming soon. Be sure to follow these steps if you'd like to contribute back via the git repository. This is a great move for the project and makes it even easier for developers to contribute their fixes and ideas back to the development group!

Joshua Thijssen has also posted a guide to getting started on his blog.

As Daniel Krook mentions in his latest blog post, the IBM developerWorks site has just posted the last part of a series he's been writing about migrating a PHP application's backend over to DB2.

IBM developerWorks has just published the final part in our series on migrating a PHP application from MySQL to DB2. [...] In addition to sharing our own experience, the series highlights the number of resources available to you to carry out your own migration.

The series is broken up into four parts:

• Prepare for your migration
• Migrate your data
• Convert your PHP code
• Deploy your application

On the PEAR blog today there's an update about the migration over to github that 5 million lines of code has already made:

Since October 2011, 5 million lines of the PEAR codebase has shifted to github. Hand in hand with this shift has been the tireless work of Daniel C - someone who brazenly said "I will fix the failing packages!" in the tail end of last year.

As a result of his efforts a list has been created of known good packages to use with PHP 5.4. Other results include:

• All test infrastructure upgrading to PHP 5.4 release candidates
• All database driven test suites executing properly, catching a variety of simple bugs
• Hitting a point of "near zero" patches to be applied to unmaintained packages
• Increasingly, the PEAR QA team is delivering PHP 5.3+ friendly forks of existing packages

Stefan Koopmanschap has written up an article on the Leaseweblabs.com blog about migrating a Symfony 1 application to Symfony2 in a (slightly) less painful way that making the move all at once.

It is much easier to do a gradual migration. Start with one part of your application, and bit by bit migrate your logic and application. The traditional way of doing such migrations is to create a new project and have parallel development on the old and the new version of the application. The problem with this, though, is that when you make a change to your old application, you have to make the same change in the new codebase, essentially doubling the amount of work for each feature you need to implement. [...] You could wrap your old application into your Symfony2 application, and have different parts of your application be handled by different versions of your codebase.

With the help of a bundle he created, IngewikkeldWrapperBundle that handles the rerouting of your requests based on where the requested resource exists (in the Symfony 1 or 2 codebase).

On the PEAR blog today it's been pointed out that many PEAR packages are moving to github as their standard place for development and repositories under the pear and pear2 accounts are available for anyone wanting to make the move.

While the existing PEAR packages will continue to use the pear.php.net distribution and bug tracking capabilities; it's never been easier to contribute to a PEAR package - simply fork; add your changes and send us a pull request. If your preferred packages aren't yet on github, please feel free to drop us a line on the pear-dev mailing list.

Here's more about the process to get the repository set up and how to migrate your package's current code from SVN over to github. The transition's pretty painless and can make the social development and improvement of your package a lot simpler.

As part of a migration the Joind.in project made to track their bugs on a hosted Jira instance instead of the Issue Tracker on Github, Lorna Mitchell, one of the leads on the project has written up an import script she used to move current issues. The code is in her latest post.

I migrated only our open issues, and comments (and the comments ended up a bit weirdly formatted on the other end but this was the best they could do). It was nothing pretty or clever but in case it's useful to someone else.

The script connects to the github API and pulls down the information for the open issues including their titles, user and body of the issue. This is then used to make another connection for each to fetch their comments. The whole thing is dumped out to a CSV file that can be easily imported by the Jira team.

On PHPEverywhere John Lim has posted some of his experiences in his migration up from PHP 5.2 to version 5.3 for his site, including code issues and how he upgraded.

Now that PHP 5.2 is at the end of life, we are starting to migrate to PHP 5.3.

Things he mentions are:

• The deprecation of session_register
• The change of creating a new object by reference
• Other deprecated functions listed here
• His commands to upgrade his Zend Server instance from 5.2 to 5.3

In a new post to his blog Daniel Krook mentions a series he, Mark Nusekabel and Yan Li Mu wrote on migrating a PHP application over from MySQL to DB2 as a backend.

IBM developerWorks has just published the first article in a series that Mark Nusekabel, Yan Li Mu and I wrote about our experience migrating a large PHP and MySQL application to DB2. In the four part series we look at preparation, switching databases, porting code, and finally deploying the application. This first installment covers the steps to plan and resources to consult when starting a migration project.

He gives links to a few other helpful resources if you're looking to make the move to DB2 like a redbook, a PHP developer's guide and an Amazon EC2 instance pre-configuured with IBM software.