On the Android Hive there's a recent tutorial posted showing you how to use Google Cloud Messaging and PHP+MySQL to do push notifications on an Android phone.

As per google's documentation "Google Cloud Messaging for Android (GCM) is a service that helps developers send data from servers to their Android applications on Android devices". Using this service you can send data to your application whenever new data is available instead of making requests to server in timely fashion. Integrating GCM in your android application enhances user experience and saves lot of battery power.

You can either follow along with the tutorial via the screencast (and download the code) or you can read through the text version, complete with code snippets, SQL and screenshots to help you along the way. The code for the Android side is included as well.

James Morris has a new post to his blog showing you how you can deploy a Silex-based application via git and a post-receive hook on the server side.

Up until a few days ago I used to use a small bash deployment script to deploy a few simple sites to my live box. The process was a git archive and extract, then an rsync to the live site. Only inspecting it recently I realised that rsync no longer sent just the changes but all of the files, I'd never noticed before as the sites were so small the deploy was over very quickly. The rsync used to work fine before as I would deploy my current working code where the timestamps on files would match the server. Since I started using git at home for dev, the git archive method timestamps the files with the latest commit's timestamp. This messes up rsync.

His process involves a checked in version of Silex, a development branch, a push of the code to the live machine and an install script to set up Silex. He includes the "technical breakdown" and the information needed to replicate it - the .gitignore, setting up password-less SSHing, setting up the server and creating the git post-receive hook (a bash script).

Sean Coates has a new post today sharing an example push process for the times when you either just need to push code (without the build process) or you're just deploying something simple - a "deploy on push" hook built into your github repository.

Sometimes, you just need to deploy code when it's ready. You don't need a build; you don't need to run tests - you just need to push code to a server. If you use git and GitHub (and I think you should be using GitHub), you can easily deploy on push. [...] There are really only three things that you need, in most cases, to make this work: a listener script, a deploy key and associated SSH configuration, and a post-receive hook.

He explains what each part of the process does and includes the simple PHP script that github calls to make the deployment (it's specific to his example, but you get the idea). He walks you through setting up the deploy key (a SSH key generated on your server) and how to get SSH to use this key when github comes knocking.

Kevin Schroeder has a method in one of his latest posts for hooking your linux-based system into Zend's phpcloud platform, complete with an automatic upload (so you're not constantly sftp-ing).

Connecting with the Zend DevCloud in Linux is actually quite easy if you know how to use SFTP. [...] But, as I said in a previous post, I hate having to do command line stuff for each and every file or commit. I like things to work seamlessly. So what I did was write a PHP script that connects to the DevCloud (or any SSH-based endpoint for that matter) and then monitors all of the files and directories for changes, such as a creation, modification or deletion event.

His script (available on github) uses the PECL inotify package to work, but once its set up, you can have the PHP process running the script in the background, pointed at your web root, and have it upload automatically.

In a new post to his blog Giulio Pons talks about how to send push notifications to an iPhone using the pushme.to application installed on the user's phone.

Push service is a technology that allows you to send alerts/notifications to a mobile device. Blackberry has its own push service, iPhone has its own, and also Android devices has their own push services. [...] I want to send push to my iPhone, but I'm not able to develop an iPhone application that receive push alerts, and I don't want to send only email alerts.

You set up the application on your phone and make a widget on their site for your application to use. Included in the post is also the PHP you can use to connect to the pushme.to service (using a curl POST request to send form encoded info to their servers).

Jani Hartikainen has posted a quick tip for Zend Framework users out there looking to force a download from their script.

"How do I make a file downloadable through my script?" This seems to be a relatively common question on #zftalk nowadays, so here's a quick wrapup!

He compares the two ways - the usual PHP-only way of using header() calls and echoing out the file versus the more Zend Framework way - using a Response object to pull in the content, set the headers and a helper to display/render the data output.

In a new post to the ThinkPHP blog today there's a look at combining Comet with PHP to make a simple method for the client to talk back to the server outside the usual methods.

If a couple of users have opened the application there are already some hundred or thousand requests per second. The outcome of this is a big load for your server and a highly increased traffic - your server will in a senseless way be overloaded. In conclusion, our problem is the enormous amount of polling without knowing whether the server really wants to send a new push. Let's turn the initial situation around. And we get the solution to our problem: Comet.

With Coment, the model changes and the request is "cached" on the server-side automatically in a single Comet instance. Coordinate this with another recommendation of theirs, a PHP socket server, and you can do some pretty interesting things.

Chris Hartjes has a quick post (but complete with code) about moving files around a bit differently than the norm - it's his method for using a HTTP-PUT to push a file out.

A work project is getting close to 0.1 status. Pretty underwhelming, I know. One of the last 'milestones' for 0.1 is taking these wonderful XML documents that my web app creates and sends them to an internal web service. This web service will accept documents via an HTTP PUT [...] so I dug around a bit on the web and put together some code.

The code is a generic "publish" method that opens a stream to the remote server and, in a binary format, pushes the contents of a local file and parses out the response.

Felix Geisendorfer has an interesting little solution posted to his blog today for those wanting to sync a Subversion repository over to a remote FTP folder without having to mess with external software (well, besides CakePHP, that is).

As the headline says, this time it's going to be my SVN/FTP Deployment Task written for the new Bake in CakePHP 1.2. It will not work with the Cake 1.1.x.x branch, and I currently do not have time to explain the procedure to work around this.

The key, in fact, is the new Bake that's included with this new version. When combined with the code it will push the contents of the directory out to the remote server. There's even some included code to make a pseudo-install to your remote server.