In this new post to his blog Mike Willbanks shows how to use PHP - more specifically the Zend Framework - to send push notifications to an Andriod device via C2DM.

So you've got a new fancy Android application and you want to be able to send push notifications to the phone. Either for synchronization purposes or for notifications. Since C2DM is fairly new and is currently in the labs it is rather difficult to find code that already handles sending out the notifications correctly. This article will go through sending a push notification (or message) through the Android C2DM server utilizing PHP in the fashion of a Zend Framework component.

His setup uses the Zend Framework for the heavy lifting and Gearman to handle the asynchronous sending of the messages. Of course you'll need a Google and C2DM account to make things play nicely together. The solution also uses a third-party server for the C2DM messaging. Most of the remainder of the post is code ready for copy and pasting that defines C2dm service adapters for the Zend Framework, some exception handlers for common issues, some custom workers for Gearman and the Java code you'll need on the client side to receive the messages.