Phil Sturgeon has a new post to his blog about what he sees 2012 as being for the PHP community - the year of cloud hosting with all of the platform-as-a-service companies that have started up over the last year.

Cloud hosting is nothing new. Seeing as "cloud" is such a loosely used term some will consider their VPS solutions on Slicehost or Rackspace to be "cloud hosting". That is partially true, but this article covers how PHP is getting some serious attention in the PaaS (Platform as a Service) field. This year you will almost certainly find yourself making the decision wether or not to move some of your applications and services across to the cloud, and this article can hopefully help you work out why and how.

He talks a bit about how the idea compares with Ruby's Heroku hosting service and some of the benefits that come with it:

• Speedy deployments
• Security
• Scaling

He also looks forward to the future, mentioning some of the major players in the PHP PaaS space like Orchestra.io and App Fog (as well as a brief suggestion of a possible PHP beta over at Heroku).

On the Zend Developer Zone David Coallier has a post about an effort starting up in San Francisco called the HackForGood Evening where developers come together to work on software with the sole purpose of helping make the lives of other people better (those who can't do for themselves).

Starting from there we realised that the idea and purpose of writing software to help the lives of the people around us was exactly what we are about but more importantly, this was an idea that should happen more than once. The HackForGood evenings were born. The following day, we decided to put a simple descriptive page together and organised the event on Eventbrite. Once this was in place we plainly announced it on Twitter to see who would be interested. After having received over 30 signups in 2 hours, we knew that we had hit a nerve and decided to make this event a success.

He goes on to talk about the evening - the presentation of the sponsors, the split off of the groups and the work (hours of it) that was done to create things like the winning entry - 911Stealth, a mobile app for contacting local emergency services when you are unable to use your voice.