The SitePoint PHP blog has started off a series of posts showing you how to integrate the IronMQ queueing system with a Laravel framework-based application. In this first post of the series, Rajiv Seelam introduces some of the basic concepts and helps get things set up to work with the queue.

This two-part article series aims to make a beginner understand using push queues with Laravel. To give a brief overview, the final solution which we will be looking at is a simple form to upload photos and resize them. Resizing images is a time consuming task, so instead of making a user wait until the image is resized we can do it in the background. At the same time, we’ll learn to use a tool called ngrok so that we can use queues in our local system.

Their example application and the Iron.io service for handling the queuing. They walk you through the setup of the Laravel project and the installation of the other necessary libraries (including ngrok for tunneling to your localhost). Finally, they help you set up the Iron.io connection with the necessary keys and how to get Laravel to subscribe to the default queue.

On the SitePoint PHP blog today there's a new tutorial showing you how to run tasks "in the cloud" using PHP and the Iron Worker service.

In this article I’m going to show you how we can use IronWorker to run code in the Cloud, just as if it were being run inside our PHP application’s code. There are a number of advantages to running tasks in the cloud, for example: processor-intensive tasks can be offloaded from your web server, better fault tolerance and the execution of your code isn’t blocked waiting for long-running tasks

The tutorial uses a Ruby-based CLI tool and this PHP Package to setup and execute the tasks. They walk you through the creation of a first task script and help you create the ".worker" file it needs to execute. With the IronWorker PHP package, you can quickly create these workers and configure things like schedule, data to send or - as their last example shows - send emails directly from the worker.