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).

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 DZone.com Giorgio Sironi has a new post talking about a development practice that's becoming more and more popular (rather than the old standby of one development platform for all developers) - using virtual machines as reusable, easily renewable platforms. He talks about the process he went through to set up PHP, including the commands used during the process.

This is an occasion to learn about a virtualization tool which I'm not familiar with, VirtualBox. The goal is to install PHP 5.4, which is not yet a stable release, to play around with new features such as traits without ruining the setup on my primary machine (which runs the super-stable PHP 5.3). Although it may be possible to run them together (I'm not a sysadmin), it's really simpler to install one of them in a virtual machine that can be thrown away if something goes wrong.

Using VirtualBox he describes the process of getting a Ubuntu system up and running including a custom compile of PHP with things like curl, bz2, mbstring and openssl support. With that installed and the Apache packages all set up, it should just be a matter of hitting your localhost's web server. If you're looking for older (or just other) versions of PHP to compile, check out the Historical Releases page on the PHP.net site.

These days there's much more involved in making a good, solid web application than just the platform you serve from. Joshua Thijssen knows this and humorously points it out in a new post about a "LAMPGMVNMCSTRAH-stack" (that's fifteen different technologies for those counting).

Back in the good old days - and in internet-time, this actually means just a few years ago - people were quite happy with their LAMP stack: Linux, Apache, MySQL and PHP. With this quartet, or a variation on it like PostgreSQL instead of MySQL, we could do everything: create a blog-site, setup an e-commerce web shop, making a guestbook, you name it and it was there.. But times have changed... radically.

He talks about this "brave new world" developers live in today where they can't know everything that happens in every facet of the application (he likens it to the responsibilities of generals vs infantry in the army).

As a programmer, you simply cannot pretend that you and you alone are running a system. You are part of a whole, and even though you might be the most important part, or the controlling part, you still need to work with other components in order to get the job done. If you forget this, no matter how good your part is running, the whole system will fail because you either decided to do too much yourself, or did not correctly utilize the rest of the system.

Wondering what his acronym stands for? LAMPGMVNMCSTRAH is short for "Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP, Gearman, Memcached, Varnish, Ngnix, MongoDB, CouchDB, Solr, Tika, Redit, ActiveMQ, Hadoop."

As mentioned in this post to The Register, Zend, a large player in the PHP market, has announced their own cloud-based platform for deploying PHP-based applications - phpcloud.com.

Zend has announced a cloud for building and deploying PHP apps on other clouds - but without the management hassle. The PHP specialist has announced phpcloud.com, which it said was a technology platform and a partner ecosystem based on the company's Zend Framework and Server. Details are vague, but the technology platform consists of Zend App Fabric and Zend Developer Cloud. The App Fabric uses the Zend Framework - a library of loosely coupled PHP components - with Zend's PHP stack and management and diagnostics tools.

The platform comes with features for caching, job queuing, high availability and code traces (among others). It plays especially nice with Zend's Studio development tool. The site, phpcloud.com has full details on what the platform offers and how you can get started with it quickly and easily with a free developer account.

Anson Cheung has a new post sharing eight things to change on your PHP install to help make things a bit more secure (from a platform standpoint, not in the code).

Obviously, PHP+ MySQL + Apache is a popular web technology.Its components are powerful, versatile and Free. However, the default settings ship with PHP is not suitable for production sites. Here, it is a check list of settings that are intended to harden the default PHP installation.

The list of eight includes things like:

• Disable Register Global
• Posing Limit
• Hiding The Presence Of PHP
• Advanced Safe Mode setting

As mentioned on the Web Species blog in this recent post, they've developed a "Windows Azure done right" platform (Azure++, name pending) that makes deploying to an Azure platform a much simpler process, pulling from something like a remote code repository (maybe github) and deploying in less than five seconds.

Azure is just impossible to use for PHP today. This is a fact. Doesn't matter which way you look at it, it just su.. isn't particularly good. The amount of steps you need to make, the knowledge you need to have and the fact that you can only deploy from Windows host are some of the things which make it a very painful experience. I had enough of this pain.

The service helps you make quick and easy Azure deployments. Features include multiple datacenter support, your choice of PHP versions (5.2 or 5.3) and the ability to deploy in "production" or "development" environments. You can find out more about the service here.

In a new post Bradley Holt looks at some of his exploration into the combination of RabbitMQ and PHP as a possible platform for messaging between process (or applications).

I'm exploring the possibility of using RabbitMQ for an upcoming project. RabbitMQ is a free/open source message broker platform. It uses the open Advanced Message Queuing Protocol (AMQP) standard and is written in Erlang using the Open Telecom Platform (OTP). It promises a high level of availability, throughput, scalability, and portability. Since it is built using open standards, it is interoperable with other messaging systems and can be accessed from any platform.

He goes through the full process - installing RabbitMQ via MacPorts, grabbing the latest copy of the librabbitmq library and installing it and finally installing the AMQP extension for PHP so they can communicate. He includes some simple code that connects to the queue and sends a "hello world" message out to the connection bound to "routeA".

On his blog today Chris Jones has posted a long list of resources that the PHP developers using Oracle as a backend could find useful in their development.

He's broken them up into categories to help split things out a bit:

• Some overall links
• The OCI8 extension
• Databases like Oracle Express Edition, MySQL, Oracle Berkley DB
• the NetBeans IDE
• Oracle Linux and Tuxedo
• Oracle Instant Client

Several of the descriptions also come with their own "Install Now" links to help you get started using them quickly. There's lots of tutorial links peppered through out the post too.

Juozas Kaziukenas has suggested an alternative to the usual "how to set up a web server" tutorials and methods for developer environment. He suggests that maybe virtual machine images are the way to go.

There are millions of articles on how to setup LAMP setup on your own machine to allow developing websites locally. I think this is a wrong approach as running server programs in one's computer creates a lot of potential problems. Better approach for this would be to use Virtual Machines as they allow bigger flexibility and fewer headaches when something goes wrong.

He talks about a few of the advantages to the approach and some of the performance gains you'd get from having your environment local like that. He points to VirtualBox as a good potential solution and some tips on working with the local server as if it was remote.