The Engine Yard blog has posted the second part of Davey Shafik's "What to Expect with You're Expecting: PHP7" series. In this new post he gets into the details of a few more of the upcoming PHP7 features including generator improvements and engine exceptions.

As you probably already know, PHP 7 is a thing, and it’s coming this year! Which makes this as good a time as any to go over what’s new and improved. In the first part of this series, we looked at the some of the most important inconsistency fixes coming up in PHP 7 as well as two of the biggest new features. In this post, we take a look another six big features to land in PHP 7 that you’ll want to know about.

The features he talks about this time are:

• Unicode Codepoint Escape Syntax
• Null Coalesce Operator
• Bind Closure on Call
• Group Use Declarations
• Generator return expressions and delegation
• Engine Exceptions

He also includes three things you can do to help/get prepared for this upcoming release including testing your code on a PHP7 VM or help out with writing tests and documentation for PHP and its extensions.

According to this new post to the EngineYard blog, they're announcing their formal sponsorship of a tool that has revolutionized the way PHP libraries and packages are used: Composer.

Open source is a big deal at Engine Yard. Originally founded as a Ruby company, most of our early work was in the Ruby community. Since acquiring Orchestra in 2011, we have been investing in the PHP commmunity and are continually on the look out for ways to give back. So I’m thrilled to be sharing the latest news on this front. [...] We care a lot about PHP and we want to continue our mission of supporting key pieces of infrastructure in the communities we serve.

Their support is coming in the form of a community grant provided over the next twelve months. This fund ($15k) will provide support for the continued development of the project and Nils Adermann, one of Composer’s principal developers.

On the Engine Yard blog Davey Shafik has a new post celebrating ten years of PHP 5 as of July 13th, 2014:

Ten years ago yesterday on July 13th 2004, PHP 5.0.0 was unleashed onto the world. Bringing with it the Zend Engine 2, effectively a brand new PHP. [...] The truth is that until PHP 5, PHP was a mostly procedural language, while it supported classes and objects, they were a bolt-on feature. This history is still visible in the majority of its default feature set even today — including some of its newest additions like the new password hashing API.

He talks about the evolution of PHP even since version 5.0.0 and how other technologies, like Ruby on Rails, has influenced the language and its developers towards greater things. He shares his answers to a few questions including:

What is the most significant change to PHP in the last 10 years?
• What's the biggest change in the community in the last 10 years?
• What's the most pressing issue for PHP?
• What would you like to see in the next major version?

He also includes an infographic of the timeline that lead up to the PHP 5.0.0 release and the advancements since then. There's even a look at the "Future of PHP" with some emerging technologies and what might lie in store for "PHP 6" (whatever that may end up being).

Matthew Weier O'Phinney has written up an article for the Engine Yard blog walking you through the full process of getting a PHP site set up and working with their platform-as-a-service hosting.

I’ve been experimenting with a variety of cloud Platform as a Service (PaaS) offerings lately, and naturally was interested in seeing what Engine Yard brought to the table for PHP developers with its Engine Yard Cloud offering. Deployment of my application includes several non-trivial aspects, and I wanted to see how easy, or difficult, it was to accomplish each.

He lists some of his criteria (including deployment from a git repo, usage of Composer and cronjobs) and notes that the EY service matches all of his needs. The rest of the post goes into the details of the deployment, breaking it up into sections:

• Initial deployment: Git and Composer
• Private Configuration setup
• Deployment Tasks
• Cronjobs
• DNS

At the end of this month (August 29th and 30th), there's a PHP event happening in San Francisco, CA that calls itself a "unique gathering of exceptional PHP developers from around the globe" - PHP: The Undiscovered Country. This two-day event includes speakers like:

• Nate Abele
• Graham Weldon
• Garrett Woodworth
• Dean Sofer

The sessions are covering things like the future of PHP application development, working with virtual teams, the HipHop VM and future-proofing your APIs. You can still pick up tickets for the event too. So far they've posted the Day 1 schedule to the site with more information (and other speakers) to come.

According to a new press release on the Oracle.com site today, they've announced the company's investment in the popular PaaS provider (and big sponsor of several PHP conferences, events and the community) Engine Yard. From the official press release:

Oracle announced today that it has made a strategic minority investment in Engine Yard, a leading cloud development platform that supports Ruby, PHP and Node.js, popular web development languages. [...] In conjunction with this investment, Oracle and Engine Yard expect to work closely together to provide cloud application developers with a greater choice of development and deployment options. The two companies are expected to connect their respective PaaS offerings to enable more rapid development of applications in a secure, reliable and scalable environment.

No word yet on how this will integrate with Oracle's own cloud solutions but it should be interesting to see what comes out of it. Congratulations to the Engine Yard folks on the investment!

In the latest episode of their "Cloud Out Loud" podcast series, Elizabeth NAramore of Engine Yard interviews Keith Casey about his role as an evangelist at Twilio.

They talk some about working at Twilio and Keith's role there, some about the Austin (Texas) technology scene that he participates in and a bit about the currently-happening TwilioCon that's running in San Francisco. There's also a mention of a conference that Elizabeth is involved in that's happening in November in Indianapolis, CodeConnexx (put on by the PHP Women group).

You can listen to this latest episode either through the in-page player or by downloading the mp3. If you'd like this and more great episodes, think about subscribing to their feed.

Engine Yard/Orchestra, a PHP platform-as-a-service (PaaS) provider has announced the release of PHP 5.4 as a part of their cloud offerings:

We’re pleased to announce the general availability of PHP 5.4 for Orchestra PHP Cloud. We are committed to keeping your apps running on the latest and greatest version of PHP. After careful lab testing, we’ll upgrade your apps as newer versions of PHP become available. What if you’re still using PHP 5.3? Don’t worry, Orchestra PHP Cloud will continue to maintain its PHP 5.3 stack. You will be able to choose which version of PHP you would like to use when you launch a new app.

The default when you set up a new application will now be PHP 5.4, so be sure you're paying attention on setup if you need something else. You can find out more about the Orchestra PaaS on the Engine Yard site and try it out for free to see how your app performs.

Engine Yard has posted their latest "Chicks That Rip" podcast episode, hosted by Elizabeth Naramore - an interview with Beth Tucker Long, the Editor of php|architect magazine. This podcast highlights women in technology in multiple communities across the web.

In the interview they talk about Beth and the work she does for php|architect, what her own favorite part of the job is and how she manages the responsibilities of working and being a parent at the same time.

You can listen to this latest episode either by using the in-page player, downloading the mp3 or by subscribing to their feed.

For those that have heard about the Lithium PHP framework but haven't gotten a chance to get into it, Engine Yard is hosting a webinar just for you. Nate Abele, one of the core developers for the framework, will be presenting an introduction to the framework on July 26th.

Lithium is a framework for PHP 5.3+ that is focused on quality, speed, and flexibility. It's a set of no-nonsense philosophies and tools that enable you to build better applications, in less time, without sacrificing quality or extensibility. Lithium understands distributed storage and caching, queuing systems, micro-dispatch frameworks, with integrated support for document oriented databases like CouchDB and MongoDB, alongside relational databases like MySQL and PostgreSQL. Lithium's architecture allows you to get your application up and running quickly, and still allows you to take control of the framework to support the requirements of your application.

If you're interested, you can sign up for the webcast on the Engine Yard site. The event happens July 26th at 10am PST.