In this new post to his site Andrew Podner looks at using the Stackato software from ActiveState to provide a Platform-as-a-Service environment on any cloud infrastructure.

So, now it is settled, I want to stay inside the corporate firewall, but I want each application isolated from the next, and by the way, there is no budget for any of this. I posted about three PaaS providers a while back, and started thinking that what I really needed was PaaS, but I needed to be able to host the PaaS environment inside a corporate LAN. Off to search the web. Surprisingly, there were not just a ton of viable results in that search. Even more surprising...hard to find one with a "download here" button. No matter how I searched though, one company & product kept popping up: Stackato by ActiveState. The words "Free Micro Cloud" were a very encouraging sign. So let's take this thing for a spin and see just how easy it is...

He walks you through the installation process - downloading the VMs, setting up the initial configuration and how to use the command line tool to deploy your own applications (several come preconfigured though). He also includes an example configuration (YAML) you can use to configure custom applications and some sample code showing a database connection.

Andrew Podner has a new post to his site today talking about platform as a service providers out there that offer PHP support. He mentions three different ones, but goes into more depth on getting a site set up with AppFog.

There are several options out there for PHP apps using this medium for deployment, and picking one is not always the easiest thing to do. The most interesting thing that I noticed about the various PaaS providers that I looked at was they way they differentiate their pricing models. [...] The PaaS providers do not make the choice nearly as simple [as VPS providers]. Each of them has different options to consider and different terminology that describes their particular product offering.

He briefly covers the offerings of three providers - Engine Yard/Orchestra, PagodaBox and AppFog. Its the final one he's most interested in, so he gets into the details and steps you'll need to create an account, set up an application and make your first push out to their platform. He also includes a hint on how to set up a .htaccess file if your application's document root is in something other than the base directory.

In a new post to his site Benjamin Eberlei continues his look at using various platform-as-a-service (PaaS) offerings for PHP available today and talks about using Composer with Windows Azure via its post deployment hooks.

It turns out that Azure Websites - to support other platforms that require compiling - actually has an extremly robust deployment system (as far as I understood its internals). If Composer fails during this step, the website will still be served from the currently running version and you don't have to face unexpected downtime. To actually run Composer as a post-deployment tool you have to do some manual work.

This manual work comes in the form of a special ".deployment" file included in the root of your repository that defines the command to execute (a custom script). Included there at the end of the post is the PHP code you'll need to put in this custom script to get the latest version of composer and then require the phar file for use later in your application.

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!

On the RedHat OpenShift blog (platform-as-a-service PHP hosting) they have a new post showing you how to integrate PHPStorm into OpenShift and make deployment simpler.

"PhpStorm is a lightweight and smart PHP IDE focused on developer productivity that deeply understands your code, provides smart code completion, quick navigation and on-the-fly error checking. It is always ready to help you shape your code, run unit-tests or provide visual debugging." In this tutorial I will show you how to use build in functionality in PhpStorm to deploy PHP application to OpenShift.

Screenshots are included in the post to guide you through the process - creating a new project, setting up the SFTP configuration and where to go to upload the changes to your system to OpenShift.

The folks over at Fortrabbit.com have officially announced the opening of their cloud-based, PHP-focused hosting platform:

We do managed hosting for over 5 years - a business where reliability is one of the core values. And Platform as a Service is just a label for a modern approach of scalable hassle-free hosting solutions. This PaaS market is very young and still a changing category in the wide field of cloud hosting. Listening to customers and their needs will influence the way current services work.

They offer a "Bootstrap" service if you'd like to try it out. It supports PHP 5.4, APC, MySQL, Git integration, Composer support, SSH/SFTP access and DNS management. You can also add on memcache and SSL support if desired.

Fortrabbit.com has conducted a survey of developers world-wide about what kind of platform, tools and software they use in their development work. They've posted the results to their site today, the answers from about 160 different developers.

We have asked our readers a few questions on their PHP workflows, hosting and tools. We are very curious about this, because we want to build the best PHP PaaS for dev guys.

Some of the highlights from their findings include the large share of Zend Framework use, the predominant use of git for deployment, MySQL still being the database of choice and multi-stage deployment (environments) are a preferred setup. You can see the full results here [pdf].

On the OpenShift blog today there's a new post about how to get started using their service together with CodeIgniter and MongoDB to create a simple site.

In this blog post, I am going to show you how to get up and running with CodeIgniter and MongoDB. Best of all, I will show you how to get all of this deployed to a fully scalable environment using OpenShift from Red Hat.

The process involves:

• Creating an OpenShift account
• Installing the RHC client tools
• Creating an OpenShift application
• Adding mongodb to your application
• Adding mongodb support to CodeIgniter
• Creating a Model, View, and Controller
• Deploy and test your application

You can then SSH into the instance and look at the database to call a "find()" and see what's there.

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!