The SitePoint PHP blog has posted a new tutorial that asks the question "Can We Use Laravel to Build a Custom Google Drive UI??" In this case it's a simplified version of the current Google Drive functionality, but it's more of a proof-of-concept than anything.

In this tutorial, we’re going to build an app that talks to the Google Drive API. It will have file search, upload, download and delete features. If you want to follow along, you can clone the repo from Github.

They walk you through the full process of getting the application set up, including creating the project on the Google side and grabbing the API credentials for use in your code. They then switch back over to the code side and create a basic Laravel project and configure it with the Google API credentials you just created. Next up is the creation of all of the routes for the list, upload and delete handling in the Laravel app as well as the controllers/views to make them all work. They also include search functionality, letting you easily query the API for files with names matching a certain string.

On his site Lukasz Kujawa has posted a new tutorial showing you how to perform automated backups to Google Drive of files through their API (using his own library).

Where do you keep backups? I guess that depends on what do you backup. You might have a very clever answer for a business critical data but what about less important content? The best example would be a private blog. It will hurt if you lose your data but the odds are you’re not willing to pay for any reliable storage. [...] There is one reliable storage, which is 100% free and almost everybody have access to it. Yes, I’m talking about Google Drive.

He walks you through the process of setting up your Google Drive account API access and where to find the data you'll need to make the connection. He then links over to his project that makes the backup a simple few lines of code (mostly configuration) of a backup path of your choice out to the remote Google Drive account.

In a quick new post to his blog today Brian Swan shows you how to find a drive letter in Azure through PHP (for a Windows Azure Drive).

Today, I’ll start by taking a look at Windows Azure Drives. Specifically, I’ll explain how to programmatically determine the driver letter for a Windows Azure Drive. (I’ll assume you’ve read the getting started post I wrote a couple of weeks ago.) Simply put, a Windows Azure drive acts as a local NTFS volume that is mounted on the server’s file system and that is accessible to code running in a role. The data written to a Windows Azure drive is stored in a page blob defined within the Windows Azure Blob service, and cached on the local file system.

He shows how he's set up his instance with two drives and how, with a bit of PHP code, he could grab the value from the "X_DRIVES" environment variable, split it out and loop to find the drive you're looking for. His example code puts a simple text file on the drive and then reads it back out.

Maarten Balliauw has written up a new post to his blog today that looks at using the Windows Azure Drive directly from your PHP scripts.

Unfortunately, .NET code is currently the only way to create and mount these virtual hard drives from Windows Azure. But luckily, IIS7 has this integrated pipeline model which Windows Azure is also using. Among other things, this means that services provided by managed modules (written in .NET) can now be applied to all requests to the server, not just ones handled by ASP.NET.

Fortunately for PHP developers, these "other services" also include a PHP running as a FastCGI instance in your IIS server. He shows how to use this connection to your advantage and reach a mapped Azure drive through the Azure Drive HTTP module (the code's included for that, too). You can find the code he shares in the post and other handy PHP+Azure related tools on the PHPAzureContrib.com site.

Ed Finkler, a long-time user of SFTPDrive on his Windows machine, has noticed something a bit odd lately when using the new Zend Studio (Eclipse):

For some reason, ZSfE just doesn’t show me my “k:” drive (the SFTP mount) when browsing for a project directory. This throws a real wrench in my usual workflow — ZS 5.5 had built-in SFTP support, and I could also use the local mount if I wanted.

Finding nothing in the traditional places, he's made this blog post hoping someone might have the answer. Turns out that the fix (as provided by Josh Johnston) is to create a new project around a new Remote Folder.

From ITJungle.com today, there's a new article that talks to Zend about their effort to get PHP pushed to the System i platform via the Zend Core and the progress it's making.

The push to create a new generation of young PHP programmers and PHP-driven Web applications on the IBM System i is moving forward according to plan, according to Zend Technology, the company commercializing the open source scripting language and providing support and training services. "Things are going phenomenally well," Zend business development vice president Mike Pinette says, giving evidence of that early success. "We're firing on all cylinders."

They go on to talk about other offerings Zend is making available for the platform including their popular Zend Platform package. There's talk of how Zend's effort is spreading (across countries) and their additional focus on the "bread and butter" shops - "manufacturers, distributors, retail chains, banks, and financial institutions that have heavily invested in OS/400 and RPG over the years".

From ITJungle.com today, there's a new article that talks to Zend about their effort to get PHP pushed to the System i platform via the Zend Core and the progress it's making.

The push to create a new generation of young PHP programmers and PHP-driven Web applications on the IBM System i is moving forward according to plan, according to Zend Technology, the company commercializing the open source scripting language and providing support and training services. "Things are going phenomenally well," Zend business development vice president Mike Pinette says, giving evidence of that early success. "We're firing on all cylinders."

They go on to talk about other offerings Zend is making available for the platform including their popular Zend Platform package. There's talk of how Zend's effort is spreading (across countries) and their additional focus on the "bread and butter" shops - "manufacturers, distributors, retail chains, banks, and financial institutions that have heavily invested in OS/400 and RPG over the years".

PHPit.net has posted yet another PHP-related tutorial, this time with a focus on test driven development.

He uses the SimpleTest frameork to illustrate his points. He starts off with a simple example - settin g up the framework and creating a class to test a class, Biter. The testing class first just looks to see if the Biter class exists, failing before they create the class file it's looking for. With the help of a bit more code and a few more test examples, you get a good jumping off point for creating your own tests to evaluate your code.

PHPit.net has posted yet another PHP-related tutorial, this time with a focus on test driven development.

He uses the SimpleTest frameork to illustrate his points. He starts off with a simple example - settin g up the framework and creating a class to test a class, Biter. The testing class first just looks to see if the Biter class exists, failing before they create the class file it's looking for. With the help of a bit more code and a few more test examples, you get a good jumping off point for creating your own tests to evaluate your code.