On PHPBuilder.com they've posted a tutorial showing you how to connect your PHP applications to Google Cloud Storage with the help of a Google App Engine instance and their own SDK.

In this article, I'll show you how to take advantage of Google's Platform as a Service (PaaS) in order to create a scalable, highly available and secure PHP web application. Note: The instructions are for Mac OSX, but may work for Linux too. Slight modifications may be needed for Windows.

They show you how to use the SDK and a bit of configuration to create a simple script that connects to the Google Cloud Storage (via a simple file_get_contents call), fetches a list of images and pulls out a random "meme" image to show from the list. They've also posted a live demo if you'd like to see the result.

Sameer Borate has posted a guide to his site today showing you how to get started with PHP applications on the Google App Engine now that it natively supports it (well, mostly).

A couple of years back if you needed to run PHP on Google App Engine you were required to use a open source tool like Quercus, a 100% Java implementation of PHP, to run your PHP applications on the App Engine. However, as you would have guessed, it was not easy to work as with using a native PHP implementation. Now that App Engine natively supports PHP and MySQL, you can easily write PHP applications.

He walks you through the setup and configuration of the App Engine SDK to interact with the service and shows how to create a simple "Hello World" PHP application and deploy it. He talks some about the overall advantages of using the Google App Engine for your application including the scalability it offers and the secured infrastructure it runs on. He finishes the post looking at the different options for data storage and how sessions should be handled (hint: memcache).

The SitePoint PHP blog has a new post from editor Bruno Skvorc showing you how to get started with the Google App Engine support for PHP, specifically through the PHPStorm IDE and it's built in support.

t's been a while since Google announced PHP support on Google App Engine. This article series will take you through all the necessary steps in getting your app up and running on GAE. For this tutorial, we'll be using PhpStorm which supports GAE projects out of the box, but you can use any IDE of your choice. Start by respecting the prerequisites for your platform. This is necessary because the Google App Engine SDK requires certain software to be runnable locally, namely Python which runs the "server".

He goes through the full process, all the way from registering a new application with the Google App Engine service out to configuring and testing a deployment through the IDE. Besides the PHPStorm-based deployment, there's also some brief mentions of how to do the deployment through a normal command line and through git (a push-to-deploy mechanism similar to what other PaaS providers use).

On the Google Cloud Platform blog there's a recent post showing you how to directly integrate the Google App Engine PHP support with the popular PHP IDE PhpStorm for seamless development.

Our IDE for PHP, PhpStorm, provides seamless integration with Google App Engine for PHP - allowing you to locally develop, debug and deploy your PHP applications on Google App Engine. When testing your application locally, we also support full emulation of App Engine services through the App Engine Development server. The [introductory] video shows how to get started with Google App Engine for PHP in PhpStorm. We also have a comprehensive tutorial which covers Google App Engine with PhpStorm in detail.

His example shows how to integrate the IDE with the Google Cloud SQL service. He shows how to create a new user (via the API console) and how to connect that user in PhpStorm. He includes a CREATE statement for a sample table and the PHP code to connect.

On the Google Developers Blog there's a new post from Keith Casey showing you how to get started with Twilio on a Google App engine, PHP-based application. It requires the use of the latest Twilio helper library, so be sure to upgrade.

I’ve wanted to explore Google App Engine for years. Between its SLA, automatic scaling, and queuing system, it has always been compelling. Unfortunately, since my Python skills are somewhere between “Hello World” and “OMG What did I just do!?” I decided to save myself the embarrassment. When Google announced PHP support for App Engine, I was both ecstatic and intrigued about what might be possible. To get something running in just a few minutes, I decided to use our Twilio PHP helper.

He walks you through the full process - setting up an App Engine account and instance, using the a href="http://www.twilio.com/docs/libraries">helper library and how you'll need to configure your routing for the files in your application.

Kevin Schroeder has an interesting post to his site about how Google is finally acknowledging PHP exists and how it's "exploding on Google App Engine"...but it's only happening just now.

How is it that one of the most despised programming languages in the word is running (as Google claims) up to 75% of the web? Many nay-sayers will say “oh it’s just WordPress” or “oh, it’s just PHPbb”. But in doing that they are completely missing the point. [...] In the article Venture Beat says “PHP is moving to the Enterprise very quickly”. This is not true. PHP IS in the enterprise and has been for a long time. People just either don’t know it or refused to admit it.

He talks about the things that PHP does, including something interesting - it exposes the focus on the theoretical (the "ivory tower" as he puts it) and puts the focus back on the practical, real-life world of just getting things done. He suggests that Google's reasoning behind taking so long to get PHP up and running on the App Engine was just someone with "their blinders on" to the world of the practical that PHP fills so well.

On PHPMaster.com today there's a new tutorial that talks about running PHP applications on the Google App Engine and makes a suggestion for an extension-based framework (Phalcon) that might work well there...if they allowed you to enable extensions.

While a full discussion of GAE is outside the scope of this article, suffice it to say that GAE is neither a private server nor a virtual private server – it’s a platform. As such, it has some limitations. You cannot simply install extensions in it, nor can you write to disk freely. You cannot alter resource limits on your own and you cannot install custom system tools. It isn’t your average Linux box; it’s a fully managed colossal environment for enterprise-level applications.

He talks some about the transition over from a typical hosting solution to the Google App Engine platform and points out some resources that can help you get started. He also restates the need for extension configuration on the platform, noting that some extensions needed for some common functionality in PHP frameworks (or the framework itself in the case of Phalcon) can't be enabled or used.

Since Google recently announced that they'd be supporting PHP on their App Engine service, developers have been trying out various setups to see how well they'd work. In this recent post Gilles Mergoil shares some of his experience with getting a Laravel 4-based application up and running in App Engine.

Now that Google App Engine opens to the PHP world and that the 4th version of the Laravel framework is officialy launched, we wanted to test these two promising technologies together at Neoxia. This blog post is the result of our tests whose goal was to have a standard Laravel 4 application on the Google App Engine PHP runtime up and running Given that an application without a database is not very useful, we also tested the Google Cloud SQL service which is the Google flavour of the MySQL database in the cloud.

He works through some of the steps for his first attempt at getting it set up, but notes that the seemingly working setup wasn't actually cooperating like it should. Thanks to some log analysis (and debugging) he found a few issues - missing functions, the lack of the mcrypt extension and session/cache/logging problems. He shows how to correct each of these and then moves on to connecting the app to a Google Cloud SQL database.

On the PHPClasses.org site Manuel Lemos has posted the latest episode of the "Lately in PHP" podcast series. This episode, number 36, talks about the upcoming release of PHP 5.5 and looks forward to 5.6.

The PHP 5.5.0 final release is about to happen. After about 16 months of development PHP 5.5 is bringing even more maturity to the PHP language, which by Google numbers is present in 75% of the Web sites. [...] hey also discussed some new features proposed for PHP 5.6 like incremental decoding of large JSON data streams and overloading arithmetic operators for arbitrary precision math. They also debated the meaning of Google finally adding support to PHP in their cloud hosting platform Google AppEngine. Also in this episode it was discussed an article about good practices to quickly detect and fix PHP code bugs that only show up in production environments.

You can listen to this latest episode either through the in-page player, by downloading it directly or you can watch the video of the live recording on YouTube.

In this new post to the PHPClasses.org blog Manuel Lemos talks some about the recent introduction of PHP into Google's App Engine offerings.

During Google I/O 2013 event a Google manager said PHP runs on 75% of the Web sites. So they decided to finally support PHP as in their AppEngine hosting service. Read this article to understand why this puts an end to years of false claims that PHP was losing market, as well what it means to Web developers using PHP or other languages.

He looks at the App Engine PHP offering and looks at whether or not its a good platform to use for hosting your application. He points out some advantages and disadvantages (including no local file system access and no remote resource access). He also includes five reasons why the "web platform war is over" and why PHP has come out victorious:

• Google Knows Because They Crawl the Whole Web
• Google Does Not Influence Web Developers so much
• Wordpress is the Dominant Blog Platform (not Blogger)
• Programming Does Not Have to Be Beautiful
• PHP Detractors Have the Wrong Focus

He admits, though, that PHP may not be dominant forever - it's not perfect, but there will always be a need for something that does what it can do (and does it well).