On the NetTuts.com site today they have a (very complete) guide to help you wrangle the Facebook Graph API and make it useful for your application. It makes use of the official Facebook PHP SDK to interface with the Graph API.

Have you ever wanted to learn how to make your applications more social with Facebook? It's much easier than you think! In this tutorial, we'll be building an application that reads and publishes data to and from Facebook using Facebook's Graph API.

The tutorial helps you get signed up on the Facebook developer site, create a first sample application, set up the SDK and make a simple page (with an added bonus of using the Twitter Boostrap for look/feed). There's a section covering permissions, what kind of data you can expect publicly for both users and posts. They wrap it up with an example of posting back to Facebook though the API and updating the status on your account. The complete code for the tutorial is also available for download.

On the CloudSpring site today there's the continuation of a previous article about RackSpace's CloudFiles API. In this new post they show how to use their PHP SDK to connect to and use the CloudFiles service.

Rackspace provides a Software Development Kit (SDK) for multiple programming languages. They store their PHP SDK on GitHub. The PHP SDK requires PHP 5 with the following modules: cURL, FileInfo and mbstring. In this tutorial we are going to review use of the PHP SDK with CloudFiles. Not all parts of the API will be covered but you will get a great start.

Code is included showing how to make the connection, work with containers, pushing content out to a CDN, object handling and a few other handy tips (and API info) to help you along your way.

Maarten Balliauw has a new post announcing the release of the latest Windows SDK for Azure for PHP, version 4.

The Windows Azure SDK 4 contains some significant feature enhancements. For example, it now incorporates a PHP library for accessing Windows Azure storage, a logging component, a session sharing component and clients for both the Windows Azure and SQL Azure Management API's. On top of that, all of these API's are now also available from the command-line both under Windows and Linux. This means you can batch-script a complete datacenter setup including servers, storage, SQL Azure, firewalls, ... If that's not cool, move to the North Pole.

He includes a few things from the changelog including service management API support for SQL Azure, package scaffolders and various performance enhancements. You can find out more about the release and the latest on the project on the Microsoft Interoperability website.

In this new post Maarten Balliauw looks at a "hidden gem" in the Windows Azure SDK for PHP - the ability to create scripts to work with command-line scripts - the Microsoft_Console_Command class.

Usually when creating a command line script you would parse $_SERVER['argv'], validate values and check whether required switches are available or not. With the Microsoft_Console_Command class from the Windows Azure SDK for PHP, you can ease up this task. Let's compare writing a simple "hello" command.

He compares the two sides of making a PHP command-line script: the "ugly way" using normal PHP code and $_SERVER['argv'] and the "easy way" using the Microsoft_Console_Command class that uses a class to define the functionality. There's also methods to grab specific arguments, pull from STDIN and get environment variables.

Maarten Balliauw has a new post to his blog today talking about a new feature they're considering adding to the SDK API - the ability scaffold and package up a PHP application for use on the Windows Azure platform.

With the fresh release of the Windows Azure SDK for PHP v3.0, it's time to have a look at the future. One of the features we're playing with is creating a full-fledged replacement for the current Windows Azure Command-Line tools available. These tools sometimes are a life saver and sometimes a big PITA due to baked-in defaults and lack of customization options. And to overcome that last one, here's what we're thinking of: scaffolders. Basically what we'll be doing is splitting the packaging process into two steps: Scaffolding and Packaging.

He goes through their current suggestions of how to set up the scaffold template that would auto-generate everything you need from a command-line call. He also talks about making custom scaffolds (that are, in concept, similar to phar archives) and gives an example of the simple structure.

In a recent post to his blog Brian Swan shows you how to use the Storage Emulator for Azure with PHP via their provided SDK. It's a quick post but it has a helpful code snippet if you've been struggling with getting it set up.

This is a short post to address this question: How do I use the local Storage Emulator (formerly known as Development Storage) when using the Windows Azure SDK for PHP? The Windows Azure Command Line Tools for PHP provide an option for running an application locally in the Compute Emulator, but I didn't see an option for using the local Storage Emulator. As it turns out, the answer is very simple, although somewhat difficult to find.

The trick is to omit the constructor parameters when creating a new table/blob/client to get it to create things locally instead of on your Azure instance. He also includes a set of links that can help fill in some of the gaps in the whole Windows Azure deployment process.

Rafael Dohms has a new post to his blog today looking at using the Facebook PHP-SDK to run FQL queries on the data for your applications.

The new SDKs have not, as you can say, fallen far from the tree. While they are really great new and shiny, documentation on how to use them is still vague, missing or spread out in the internet in blogs like these, in posts from us users trying to share the information with other soon-to-be-suffering developers. So this is an example of this, i have been using these new resources and the new PHP-SDK and have ran into various walls, so I decided to start putting some of this on my blog, for 2 reasons: to spread the word, and to have notes for myself when I come back to this.

The post gives an example of using the "api" method provided by the PHP SDK from Facebook to push an array of parameters, one being the query, to the remote API for parsing. He includes the code for a simple (namespaced) helper to take in the query and return the API's return data set.

Joey Rivera has posted a new tutorial about using the Facebook Graph API in your PHP application using the PHP SDK.

As promised, here is a post (similar to my Twitter API post) on using the Facebook API. There are many reason why one would want to access the Facebook API '" maybe to create a mobile app that lets you post photos to your Facebook albums, or maybe you just want to show your last few Facebook status updates on your blog; what ever the reason may be, Facebooks Graph API mixed in with their PHP SDK makes it really easy to accomplish this.

He shows you how to set up the environment and use the SDK to authenticate to the service and retrieve the latest status information for a User object, add a new status, view photos from an album and pushing a new photo to the album.

On the Amazon Web Services blog there's a new post about the release of their new AWS SDK for PHP that use can use to directly access their web services features from your PHP applications.

The first release supports a large subset of our infrastructure services including the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), the Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3), Amazon CloudFront, Amazon CloudWatch, Amazon SimpleDB, the Amazon Simple Notification Service (SNS), the Amazon Simple Queue Service (SQS), as well as Amazon Identify and Access Management (IAM).

The SDK for PHP includes all of the libraries you'll need to directly access the mentioned services, some code examples to help you get started and some documentation to fill you in on some of the finer points. There's also a few code snippets included in the post to show you a sample SNS connection that creates a topic, subscribes to it and publishes a notification.

On Developer.com there's a recent tutorial looking at developing your first Andriod application in PHP (running in a PHP interpreter on your device).

Google's open source Android mobile operating system is taking the smartphone market by storm. Unlike Apple, which has stringent guidelines and requirements for developers who want to offer their applications on the iPhone App Store, Google has left the Android platform wide open. You can even write Android applications in PHP now. The folks at Irontech have created a PHP port to run on Android, and with the Scripting Layer for Android (SL4A), you can build PHP Android applications.

He shows you how to install the tool on your emulator (it doesn't have to be on a device) and how to set up the PHP environment to work with the SDK. He also includes some sample code to help you get started - an interface to the take88.com. There's also instructions on how to get the mini-application working on your phone.