Recently, the Zend Framework community has developed a new component for cloud services: Zend_Cloud_Infrastructure. This component was provided to manage [...]

A number of industry leaders have comes together and made an announcement. A new Simple Cloud API is being developed for PHP, that will create an easy way to interface with any number of cloud services. The current contributors to this project include Zend, Microsoft, IBM, Rackspace, Nirvanix, and GoGrid.

With their promise of massive scalability and high availability, Amazon Web Services (AWS) are getting a lot of attention from PHP developers. In particular, EC2 can run fully optimized and configured PHP environments that can be used to test and deploy applications without the headaches of hardware provisioning and management.

But developers have been left with the chore of building and finely tuning these PHP images. No more! Zend has built a full-featured Zend Server CE Amazon Machine Image (AMI) that can be spun up and ready to do your bidding within minutes.

In this article, I’ll show how easy it is to find and launch this AMI.

You’ve probably heard about ‘the cloud’. It’s the latest buzzword circulating in Silicon Valley and beyond. In some ways, ‘cloud’ is a fitting name- everyone sees something different when they look at it. For example, offerings as dissimilar as force.com and Amazon’s MapReduce service have worked their way in to ‘the cloud’ moniker at some point. Even the cloud’s biggest advocates can’t agree on what ‘the cloud’ is. But in teasing the facts out of all the hype, you’ll find some services that could change how you write and deploy your PHP applications forever.

On the Ibuildings TechPortal blog, Vito Chin has written an introduction to how to use cloud computing servers (primarily Amazon S3, EC2, etc) with, and from, PHP

p. Ok, again, I’ve fallen way behind now on my book reviews. Here’s one that was released late last year that I’m just now getting around to reviewing. Click on inside, lets talk about “PHP Programming with PEAR”.

p. ! Jason Gilmore, Editorial Director for Apress Open Source and author of three books, shows you how you too can track his book’s popularity on Amazon. Ok so he also shows you how he used the Zend Framework to build his mashup too.

p. !

J Wynia creates a cool new mashup! PHP + Amazon = Printable DVD Wallet Covers. A great sample showing a practical, real-world example of PHP doing the Web 2.0 thing.