Henri Bergius has a new post to his blog showing you how to use the popular Composer package management tool to manage dependencies in Heroku applications.

While Heroku got its start from hosting Ruby on Rails applications, it nowadays supports many different environments in the Cedar stack. Node.js is what many use, but they also do support PHP. Dependency management is easy for Node.js applications as Heroku recognizes your package.json files and automatically installs the libraries needed via NPM.

Until now PHP developers haven't had this convenience, but as Composer is emerging as the default PHP package manager, I've now added support for it. Before the pull request gets accepted, Composer dependency handling can already be used by specifying my custom PHP buildpack when creating Heroku apps.

He shows you how to get it up and running with a sample application - creating the new git archive, creating the Heroku app with the custom backapack (and a "composer.json" file), setting up the main "index.php" file and push it all to Heroku. You can view his sample application here (a simple URL encoding form).

The latest issue (second) of the "Web and PHP Magazine" has been released. Articles in this issue include:

• An interview with Colin Hayhurst, co-founder of StackBlaze, on running a PHP startup
• A preview of PHP Summit 2012 UK
• Stefan Priebsch (thePHP.cc) on how to see the bigger picture (application architecture)
• 'PaaS: The Cloud On-Ramp For PHP Developers' (by Lucas Carlson of AppFog)
• 'Cryptography In PHP' (by Enrico Zimuel of Zend)

Once again, you can download this issue for free to enjoy!

Phil Sturgeon has a new post to his blog about what he sees 2012 as being for the PHP community - the year of cloud hosting with all of the platform-as-a-service companies that have started up over the last year.

Cloud hosting is nothing new. Seeing as "cloud" is such a loosely used term some will consider their VPS solutions on Slicehost or Rackspace to be "cloud hosting". That is partially true, but this article covers how PHP is getting some serious attention in the PaaS (Platform as a Service) field. This year you will almost certainly find yourself making the decision wether or not to move some of your applications and services across to the cloud, and this article can hopefully help you work out why and how.

He talks a bit about how the idea compares with Ruby's Heroku hosting service and some of the benefits that come with it:

• Speedy deployments
• Security
• Scaling

He also looks forward to the future, mentioning some of the major players in the PHP PaaS space like Orchestra.io and App Fog (as well as a brief suggestion of a possible PHP beta over at Heroku).

On the php|architect site today Keith Casey has posted a recording of an interview with Boaz Ziniman of Zend about one of their latest offerings, phpcloud - a platform-as-a-service to provide easy, scalable PHP application hosting.

At the tail end of ZendCon 2011 in October, I managed to corner Boaz Ziniman to chat on the launch of their new product phpcloud. We covered features, limitations, design & implementation considerations, and how it's different than most of the other options out there.

If you'd like to listen, you can grab the mp3 here. It's about 15 minutes long. You can find out more about Zend's cloud offering on phpcloud.com.

PHPFog, the PHP-centric platform as a service has made a new post to this blog about two new "gifts" they're providing to developers:

I want to thank you for your interest in PHP Fog. Thanks to you and tens of thousands of developers like you, we have grown massively in the last year and a half. As a sign of my gratitude, I'd like to give you two free gifts.

Their gifts to the community are a conversion of the 6 month applications over to a free-for-life product and you can now deploy three of these "free forever" applications instead of just the one. You can signup here for the service with offerings of installed software like PyroCMS, Drupal 7, MediaWiki and Slim. For more information, you can attend this webinar.

On the php|architect blog today there's a new post from Joel Clermont about some of the recent cloud-based offerings that have popped up in the PHP world - Platform as a Service solutions that can help take the effort out of the usual application hosting issues.

Enter the newcomer to the world of PHP deployment options: Platform as a Service (PaaS). You may be rolling your eyes at the introduction of yet another buzzword and acronym, but before you dismiss it, consider how it might fit in to your application hosting strategy. I've heard Platform as a Service described as a "layer above the cloud," that is, it builds on the existing cloud infrastructure, like Amazon's EC2, but abstracts away all the setup and maintenance tasks of running an entire server. As David Coallier described it to me, the goal is to "deploy apps, not servers."

Joel mentions two different offerings that have popped up recently - PHPFog and Orchestra. Both services have some nice features that he gets into including application templates, git integration and configuration for specific kinds of technologies (like database support and memcache availability).

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.