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.

The /Dev/Hell podcast (hosted by PHP community members Chris Hartjes and Ed Finkler) has posted its latest episode - Episode #33 - Pol Pot-level Sucks.

Back in the saddle for the double-tres, Chris and Ed rap about the loss of trust in Google and how that affects their perception of the Go language. Then Ed babbles for way too long about vintage gaming and computing. Chris wonders how you could be truly private on the Internet in the light of widespread government surveillance. Finally, we talk about the importance of automation and repeatable processes.

You can listen to this latest episode either through the in-page player or by downloading the mp3 directly. You can also subscribe to their feed so you'll know when the latest episodes are released.

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).

Gonzalo Ayuso has a new post to his site today showing how to use the recently released PHP support for the Google App Engine along with Silex to create a login provider.

Last week Google announced the PHP support for Google App Engine (GAE). PHPStorm, the great IDE for PHP development, also announced support for Google App Engine PHP. Because of that now is time to hack a little bit with this new toy. [...] To build a simple Silex application over Google App Engine is pretty straightforward (more info here). Because of that we're going to go a little further. We are going to use the log-in framework provided by GAE to log-in with our Goggle account within our Silex application. In fact we can use the standard OAuth authentication process but Google provides a simple way to use our gmail account.

He includes the code showing what the end result will look like as well as what's needed for the "LoginProvider" class. He also creates an "Auth" class where most of the work is done - creating the login URL, redirecting the user and checking to see if the user is logged in. He's made a screencast of the full process so you can see the authentication flow as its happening.

On the Google Developers Blog (and lots of places across the web) there's a major update that Google has done for their AppEngine service - the introduction of a PHP runtime to their offerings.

App Engine 1.8.0 is now available and includes a Limited Preview of the PHP runtime - your top requested feature. We're bringing one of the most popular web programming languages to App Engine so that you can run open source apps like Wordpress. It also offers deep integration with other parts of Cloud Platform including Google Cloud SQL and Cloud Storage.

You can get more information about how to use this new feature on Google App Engine site.

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 this recent post to the Duckout blog, they show you how to hook your PHP-based (and database driven) application into the Google Charting API for chart/graph generation.

I think, whenever we see a chart in a magazine, in books or applications our brain say's to us Yeepie!!! Don't read these stupid texts or tables! Just look at the green or yellow line and hope that they are above the other lines or hope that your opinion is the biggest part of the pie¯. This saves us a lot of work and in my opinion we should concentrate on drawing beautiful colorized pie charts, instead of writing long boring articles. But the question is: ¯How do I draw these beautiful colorized pie charts? The simple answer is: you don't have to, because google will draw them for you and you just have to tell them what to draw via the google charts api.

The sample application is a "breakfast rating" tool that logs the results to a MySQL database via PDO calls. The results are then extracted and formated as JSON to be compatible with the Google Charts API data handling. Some sample Javascript is included showing how to call the Charts API with your data and get back a simple line graphing of the data from the database. You can see the application in action here for reference.

in this new post to his site Sherif Ramadan shares a method for visualizing your website's visitor data with the help of the Google Visualization APIs and some geolocation.

The web is a place where everyone is in your backyard. This can be both a blessing and a curse. How do you know where your website traffic is coming from and how much of it there is? [...] How was traffic led to your website in the first place and why? How long do people stick around and what do they like the most about your site? These are all some of the many questions you can answer with web analytic software, but the real question is why would you want to answer these questions at all and what's the best way to look at the answer?

[...] If we look at a heat map it's easier to spot where the majority of our visitors and traffic are coming from, geographically. It also helps us understand that people visiting a virtual space can, and will, be physically located in different parts of the world.

He includes the steps to recreate a map like the one included in this page showing the current view statistics on his site. He uses a MySQL backend to store the GeoIP data and parses out the Apache "access_log" to get the IPs of the visiting users. He then runs these against the GeoIP data and passes this country data on to Google's visualization for handling. He also recommends using the tools offered by the Google Webmaster Tools to further enhance your introspection into your site's visitors.

With the recent focus on security (caused by some major issues with large companies) Google has responded by reinforcing their 2-Factor Authentication method. Thankfully, there's a way you can implement that functionality in your applications too using the information in this tutorial (note: the date of posting is older, but it's definitely relevant now).

Many large web services nowadays support 2-step verification to enhance the security for their users. [...] The main point about 2-step verification is that something else than your computer provides that token. If it's on your computer and that one gets stolen (or hacked into), it won't help much for the additional security. That's why you need a second device for those tokens.

They link to this library that can help you implement something similar to Google's Authenticator tool for your application.

In this new tutorial on the Script-Tutorials.com site, they show you how to use the Google API (and OAuth) to access contacts information from your Gmail account.

In our new tutorial I am going to tell you about inviting friends. I think that this is the most important part for every website, a key to success. Today I will show you how to create simple and effective Gmail contact importer using OAuth authorization and API. Also, I will tell about obtaining Google API access too.

Screenshots show you how to get to the access token information you'll need to connect and the full code is included to help you get authenticated and pull down the contacts list to display in the page's HTML output.