Gonzalo Ayuso has a new post today showing how he set up Android push notifications to a Phonegap-based application with PHP.

Last days I’ve been working within a Phonegap project for Android devices using Push Notifications. The idea is simple. We need to use the Push Notification Plugin for Android. First we need to register the Google Cloud Messaging for Android service at Google’s console, and then we can send Push notifications to our Android device.

He includes the steps you'll need to push the notification and the library to make the cURL connection out to the Google messaging platform. He's posted the full code out to github.

At this year's ZendCon conference a new technology was introduced (well, and upgrade to an existing product) that allows PHP developers to create Android applications from Zend Studio 10.

ZendCon, the annual trade show for Zend, the PHP company, announced that Zend Studio 10 (Zend’s IDE) will include functionalities that will let PHP developers prototype and build native mobile apps using PHP. The new capability includes a drag-and-drop mobile interface builder, integration with the Apache project’s Cordova to access native mobile APIs such as those for cameras and accelerometers, and built-in PhoneGap integration for developers to publish native app packages to the various app stores.

You can see an example of the software in action here (video) and get a bit more information about the offering from this article from VentureBeat.

Kevin Schroeder, in his move towards doing some mobile development, has a new post to his blog about why he's still going to stick with PHP for the backend of this new development work.

I do like working with client/server-like architectures and so I intend to be building apps that have a fair amount of server-side processing to back it up. More details on that to come in the next few months. [...] I have decided that, for the time being, to use PhoneGap for my frontend development. [...] So the question was what to use for the backend development and, to nobody’s surprise I presume, PHP is my chosen way to go.

Some of his reasons for the choice include:

• PHP is stupid easy to scale
• It is tied to the web
• (Available) Frameworks
• Tons of blogs
• It integrates with everything

Check out the post for more of his reasons.