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.

Luc De Brouwer has a reminder for web services developers out there - don't forget about backwards compatibility.

About a year ago I was asked by a client to update their existing web service because of some changes in the way they wanted to process their sales data. Luckily this client has always understood the importance of a Service-Oriented Architecture ( SOA ) since they deal with large amounts of resellers who need to access, edit and create data. All I had to do was apply the changes to their web service.

He lists the steps he followed when making the update - thinking about backwards compatibility, evaluating current functionality for use and possibly decommissioning older pieces.

On the Ibuildings techPortal today there's a great overview of web services from Lorna Mitchell covering everything from the HTTP protocol to data formats to REST and SOAP protocols.

In this world of sharing data, increasing numbers of sites and applications are making information available over web services. Whether we are building a service as a feature of our own development, or pulling in the information published by others, we will need to understand the different service types and how to work with them in PHP. This article aims to give you the tools to do just that.

She starts with the basics every web service developer should know - the HTTP spec - and moves from there into things like RPC services, data formats, SOAP messaging, a few debugging tips and finally one of the more talked about technologies these days - REST.

On the Ibuildings techPortal today Vito Chin has posted a new article dealing with PHP and "the Cloud" - where the popular web language fits into the move towards cloud computing.

Cloud computing refers to the utilization of shared, elastic resources and processing power accessed via the Internet. In some ways, it hails the reversion to the golden age of time-sharing but with significant improvements to the distribution philosophies underlying the delivery infrastructure. [...] Cloud-based development involves in some sense, the outsourcing, of various parts of the application out of the server and into the cloud.

Included is an illustration of how an application would interact with the cloud and an example of working with the S3 service that Amazon offers. The example mentions both the normal services and something called the "elastic compute cloud" that lets you use remote services to run virtual instances of other operating systems.

The Zend Developer Zone has published the latest podcast in their PHP Abstract series today - an episode hosted by Davey Shafik talking about web services in PHP.

Today's special guest is Davey Shafik. Davey is a regular on PHP Abstract and I've receited his bio enough so that those of you who listen regularly can probably recite along with me. [...] Today Davey is going to talk to us today about Web Services.

As always, you can either pull down the mp3 by itself and listen to the show right away (or use the embedded player for that matter) or you can subscribe to the feed and get this and other great episodes (including a previous vidcast from Davey) delivered right to your desktop.

If you missed the Zend Webcast talking about "Advanced PHP Solutions" with Zeev Suaski, ComputerWorld has your chance to grab the download from it.

PHP continues to enjoy phenomenal growth becoming the de-facto standard for enterprise Web applications. With the introduction of PHP 5, PHP has reached new levels of support for Web Services, XML and Service Oriented Architectures (SOA) meeting the robust demands of the enterprise environment. Learn how you can achieve scalability, performance, availability and reliability for your enterprise-class PHP applications with advanced PHP solutions from Zend Technologies.

In the webcast, Zeev talks about integrating web services, tracking and improving the response times in your application, scaling your applications, and troubleshooting applications down to the exact line of code.

Going along with the Roadmap update Zend has recently put out about it's Framework, Andi Gutmans has also announced the introduction of more mailing lists to help developers communicate more effectively.

In line with the roadmap email, I'd like to form 8 new mailing lists which will make it easier for people to discuss/participate in subject areas which are of interest to them (actually 7 new ones as docs already exists).

I did think of calling the lists fwdev-* to note them as dev lists but I think it makes more sense to keep them open to the users. I find it very valuable to get users asking questions and commeting on functionality on the dev lists as that's valuable input from the users.

The new mailing lists up and running. They are:

• fw-webservices@
• fw-mvc@
• fw-auth@
• fw-i18n@
• fw-db@
• fw-core@
• fw-formats@

To check out the topics that fall under each category, check out the sections of the roadmap.

On the Zend Developer Zone today, Cal Evans shares another interview he did at this year's OSCON in Oregon, this time with Adam Tracthenberg.

Adam is the senior manager of Platform Evangelism at eBay. His job is to communicate to developers all the cool things possible with eBay's web services. We sat for a half-hour to discuss PHP, eBay, where things are and where they are going. Here's what he had to say.

They talk about how Adam got into both PHP and made his way to eBay, a glimpse into the eBay web services API, some talk about Adam's book, and what he sees for the future of PHP and its community.

And, of course, what would an interview be without a "fun" question - Cal asks Adam about his favorite technology right now, but you'll have to check out the interview for the answer to that question.

The program for this year's ApacheCon Europe has been published (as linked from on DynamicWebPages.de).

The conference will be from June 26th through the 30th in Dublin, Ireland. Registering before May 29th will get you an early bird discount of about 50-60 Euro. After that, prices start at 680 Euro and go up. You can get complete details on the conference and signup online at their site.