On the Exakat GitHub account Damien Seguy has put together a pretty complete list of static analyzers you can use for your PHP applications.

The list is broken down into the types of scanners:

• Bugs finders
• Coding standards
• DIY
• Fixers
• Metrics
• SaaS
• Misc

Each section includes a good list of tools and links to each of them (usually just to other GitHub repositories but some go to actual project pages). There's a lot of them to look through but be careful to evaluate the current state of the project. Just because it's linked here doesn't mean it's a complete tool.

On the Laravel News site Eric Barnes has posted a guide to installing and configuring the alpha version of Spark, the latest offering from the Laravel ecosystem for building out a unified SaaS billing system.

The Alpha of Laravel Spark has just been released and it’s goal is to be an opinionated way of building out business oriented SaaS applications. It features team management, user roles, recurring billing through Stripe, and much more. In this tutorial let’s take a deeper look at this new package.

He gets right into the installation of the tool as a Composer package to pull in the spark installer command line tool. A quick spark install command is all it takes to create the new application. He then gets into the different things that you can do with the generated application including:

• Customize Registration and Profile Updates
• Customize Roles
• Customize Settings Tabs
• Building Spark Subscription Payment Plans
• Create Coupons and Discounts

This is just a preview of what's offered in the package and what's to come in the final product, but it gives you a good idea of where it starts.

In this latest post to the SitePoint PHP blog Chris Ward takes a "first look" at the Platform.sh development and deployment service.

Not so long ago, many of us were satisfied handling deployment of our projects by uploading files via FTP to a web server. [...] The old methods for deploying became unstable, unreliable and (generally) untrusted. [...] So was born a new wave of tools, services and workflows designed to simplify the process of deploying complex web applications, along with a plethora of accompanying commercial services. Generally, they offer an integrated toolset for version control, hosting, performance and security at a competitive price. Platform.sh is a newer player on the market, built by the team at Commerce Guys, who are better known for their Drupal eCommerce solutions.

He talks about some of the requirements for using the service (including Drush, the Drupal command line tool) and how to get started with a new project. He shows how to get the codebase with their CLI tool, pushing SQL data up to the instance, and starting in on some development work. He shows how to configure the modules you want to use and adding some additional content to the data. He also covers some of the other features of Platform.sh including: performance and profiling tools and integration with Redis, Solr and the EntityCache/AuthCache tools.

On 7PHP.com today there's a new interview, another with Vito Chin, this time talking about cloud computing and doing PHP development specifically for that environment.

Whenever we talk about web development nowadays, there has to be an awareness or at least an interest towards cloud computing. We, as PHP Developers, should be aware of what development in the cloud has to offer and how we can leverage it to stay in the game. To this end, I bring forward a small interview with the Pro Cloud Computing guy, I named Vito Chin! Let’s hear and learn form his pro experience and advice...

After some brief introductions, they start in talking about Vito's book (co-author) "PHP Development in the Cloud" and some of the basics of SaaS (cloud-based services) ownership. He mentions the high scalability needed and some architecture considerations you'l need to keep in mind during development. He also points out a few "pain points" to watch out for and includes some recommendations of services/libraries to use.

In this new article on the Zend Developer Zone, Wil Sinclair has made a "forecast" of sorts as to the role that PHP could be playing in cloud computing in the future.

There are three kinds of services that are commonly associated with the cloud: Software as a Service (SaaS), Platform as a Service (PaaS) and Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS). Software as a Service has gotten a lot of good press in the past few years, as Salesforce and the like have seen adoption from the smallest shops to the largest corporations.

He points to Platform as a Service as the most likely target for PHP (like the Google App Engine). He also points out some of the other providers for the other types (SaaS, IaaS) like Salesforce, Mosso, Amazon Web Services and Rackspace CloudServers. He digs into a bit more detail on the IaaS services, describing how they work (complete with a fun image) and how your application would fit inside.