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.

James Fuller has posted a review of the online code editing tool Cloud9 and how well it works for his PHP development.

At first I though Cloud9 would be a simple editor, perhaps a nice showcase of what you can do with HTML5 and some well-written javascript but it quickly became evident that this app was packing a lot of powerful features. [...] Sounds pretty awesome if you think about it. You can even connect you own server via SSH instead of using the build in sandbox (this is a paid feature). Is this the Holy-Grail? Not Really, but it's close. This is a very exciting product that almost reaches holy-grail status, but it falls short in a few key areas.

He includes a little bit about trying to use PHP 5.5 in the Cloud9 editing, and points out that while he was (eventually) able to get the PHP 5.5 alpha compiled, he wasn't able to get things like memcache compiled and working.

The Cloud9 team has done a great job removing the barriers to getting a simple idea out the door. I implemented FizzBuzz in PHP using Composer, PHPUnit, and some SPL interfaces and got it all done , and posted to GitHub in about an hour.

On the QaFoo site they've shared a tool they use for doing code reviews in a new post to their blog. The tool, just called review, lets you run several different metrics on the code including the PHP "mess detector", PDepend and PHPCPD (copy & paste detector).

We, at Qafoo, do Code Reviews quite often together with our customers. This often focusses on dicussing metrics, browsing the associated code and discussing solutions for the issues found. We started using a bunch of shell scripts for that, like everyone else, but at some point we came up with a webinterface to do this in a more comfortable way. Now we want to share this tool with you.

Included in the post are several screenshots showing the results of the different types of evaluations - the ones mentioned above as well as things like "methods per class", cyclomatic complexity and NPath complexity. There's also a source code browser and a visual class structure generation tool (UML). It's under a AGPLv3 license and can be found on their site.

PHPMaster.com has a new article about a practice that's becoming more popular in recent years to help increase the quality of code that comes out of development - code reviews.

Every developer knows the pain of banal mistakes. A wrong attribute here, a misspelled property there, an accidentally duplicated line of code which you missed because of the coffee-fueled 16 hour hackathon you've been on. [...] Code review is simply the act of having someone else look at your code to find the mistakes you missed.

The tutorial talks about the types of code reviews (three of them with varying levels of involvement) as well as some best practices to follow in your reviews like:

• Know your common mistakes and actively fight them.
• Peer code review means being reviewed by someone of equal or greater skill.
• Collect metrics.
• Be mindful of the social aspect - finding bugs is good, not bad!

On PHPMaster.com today there's a new article posted that has a review of PHPStorm, an IDE from JetBrains that focuses on providing a great experience for PHP developers and tons of features.

It's said the tool doesn't make the craft - a carpenter can drive a nail into a wooden plank using a hammer, a rock, another plank, or his forehead, but he'll rarely choose anything other than the hammer. [...] I'm talking about using a text editor versus using a full-fledged PHP-dedicated project-oriented IDE for PHP application development. Both will get the job done, but productivity-wise, one is obviously a better choice than the other.

Bruno Skvorc goes through a brief summary of what the editor is about and talks about some of the more notable features including:

• Being built on Java (good and bad)
• The IDE being strictly project-oriented
• Supports the latest PHP version, including 5.4
• Smart refactoring
• Good intellisense support

He also mentions the plugin architecture that's included with the product and a few of the more handy plugins available. They're also running a giveaway in collaboration with the PHPStorm folks and are giving out IDE licenses and copies of SitePoint's "PHPMaster: Create Cutting Edge Code" book (rules are included in the article).

On his blog Brandon Savage has a new post reviewing a book from Chris Hartjes, "The Grumpy Programmer's Guide To Building Testable Applications".

When most developers think about books on testing, they think about books that highlight things like "test driven development" or "how to build a test for X." [...] This is not true of Chris Hartjes' book, "The Grumpy Programmer's Guide To Building Testable PHP Applications". When I asked Chris if I could review his book, I expected a step-by-step guide to writing tests. What I got was a step-by-step guide to building an application that COULD be tested. There's a big difference, and it's important to understand the distinction.

He points out that the book provides more about good application structure than who to write the tests for it. It provides a guide to creating modular applications that can be easily pulled apart and tested as well as some practical examples. He also includes a few "wise words" quoted from the book including: "if it's not yours, wrap it up" and "testing is good; testable applications are better."

You can pick up your own copy of the book fron its page on the Leanpub site.

On Dzone.com there's a book review from Ivan Ilijasic covering a recently released title from Packt Publishing, the "PHP Ajax Cookbook" (by Milan Sedliak, Rajesh Jeba R. Anbiah and Roshan Bhattarai). His review gives a "one minute bottom line" about the book and its contents.

I've been in PHP development for more than 10 years and this book is really useful material. I could recommend it to beginners and experienced developers. From my point of view, there are three types of developer books - complete byte-to-byte fat books, introduction books and cookbooks. I want my cookbook to have useful and simple to use recipes. This book fulfilled my expectations.

He mentions some of the topics that the book covers including javascript libraries and frameworks (mostly jQuery) and recipes for things like form validation, dynamic content, pagination and drag and drop functionality. He also points out some coverage of testing and debugging content as well as web service "mashups" and mobile app development.

Lorna Mitchell has posted a book review of an O'Reilly publication (by Steve Francia) - "MongoDB and PHP".

The tone of the book is quite informal and approachable [...]. This book also does a great job of deferring to other resources where that is appropriate; in particular where some features of MongoDB will change rapidly and the online documentation is well-maintained. [...] There is no hiding from the very lovely, very technical, features available in MongoDB and although this book doesn't drill into all the possible use cases of each one, it does cover some advanced topics such as sharding and GridFS which was completely new to me.

Her review of the book is positive, noting that it takes a topic that, despite possibly being overwhelming for someone new to it, makes it approachable and easy to digest. You can find out more about this book on the O'Reilly website.

InfoWorld has a new article posted looking at some of the PHP IDE options out there and comparing some of their strengths and weaknesses including PHPStorm, Eclipse, Aptana and Zend Studio.

PHP is more than just a language for junior high school kids to learn after they master balancing DIV tags in HTML. It can support enterprise-grade installations and deliver the kind of heavy lifting that brings power plants to their knees. [...] To get a flavor for the latest in PHP programming, I spent some time unpacking the current set of development tools for PHP - eight in all.

The IDEs he sampled were:

• Zend Studio
• PHPStorm
• PhpEd
• phpDesigner
• NetBeans
• Komodo IDE
• CodeLobster
• Aptana Studio

He points out that, while all of these tools have their good and bad things about them, sometimes you don't need something that heavy to get the job done. Sometimes something simpler might do just right. He recommends trying them out on your projects and seeing which is the best fit, though. He thinks that you'd probably "need to be working on a bigger PHP project" before an IDE would become really useful though.