The SitePoint PHP blog has posted a tutorial from Daniel Berman giving you a step by step guide to setting up an Elastic LAMP stack on AWS, the Amazon Web Services platform using Zend Server.

This article introduces what is probably one of the simplest ways of setting up and running an elastic LAMP stack on the cloud – using Zend Server on AWS.

More specifically, the workflow described here includes launching a pre-configured AWS CloudFormation template that sets up all the components of a LAMP stack: Zend Server’s certified PHP stack plus all of Zend Server’s add-on features (including Z-Ray), a MySQL database, a Zend Server elastic group consisting of additional Zend Server instances, an elastic load balancer, and other pre-configured security definitions. This article is perfect for those contemplating moving their production environment to the cloud or those who already have one set up on AWS.

He starts with some of the basics: what Zend Server is and what role CloudFormation plays in the deployment process. The rest of the tutorial is broken up into several steps of the setup and deployment process:

• Step 1: Launching the stack
• Step 2: Managing the stack
• Step 3: Deploying an application
• Step 4: Monitoring the stack

They include screenshots of the web-based interfaces you'll use to complete each of these steps, giving you a great visual guide to where you should be and what things should look like. In the end you'll have a simple application, running in AWS on Zend Server you can easily monitor and configure.

Lorna Mitchell has officially announced the release of her O'Reilly-published book about creating and working with web services in PHP, PHP Web Services.

I'm delighted to announce that my new book "PHP Web Services" is now available as an early release! [...] The book isn't huge (or expensive, hint!), but it aims to give solid theory in a practical and approachable way. There's the topics you'd expect to see, covering HTTP and verbs and headers and status codes, and also around data formats. It also covers RPC services including SOAP, and also has a chapter (predictably the longest one!) about REST. I've tried to go beyond simply the "how to do" and into the "how to do in a kick-ass manner" realm, so there are chapters about how to design your API and choose what kind to build, how to handle errors, how to make your API really robust - and of course how to debug when things go wrong!

The book not only has the summaries and descriptions of some common web service challenges, but also includes code samples you can use in your own projects.

The Amazon Web Services group has recently released an updated version of their SDK for PHP and at it's heart is the open source project Guzzle (a HTTP client framework).

The new SDK is built on top of the Guzzle HTTP client framework, which provides increased performance and enables event-driven customization. Each AWS service client extends the Guzzle client and describes operations on the service using a service description file. The SDK now manages persistent connections for both serial and parallel requests. It detects transient network failures, with automatic retries using truncated exponential backoff. Support for event hooks (via the Symfony2 EventDispatcher) allows you to implement custom, event-driven behavior.

In the AWS post about the update, they give you a few code snippets showing this updated version in use. This completely reworked version of the SDK is not compatible with the previous version, so you'll need to consult their migration guide to bring things up to date.

On the Codeception blog (an up and coming PHP-based testing tool) there's a new post showing how to use the tool to test your web services for either a SOAP or REST-based service.

Codeception testing framework got significant improvements during last week. The first and the major one is that you don't even need PEAR and Composer to execute tests. Only one file codecept.phar required. This might save your time and mind of your testers.

They've recently added modules for SOAP and REST support, making it easier to define your tests in a more fluid fashion. Included in the post are two examples, one REST and one SOAP. You can find more information about these new testing features over in the tool's documentation.

On the Amazon Web Services blog there's a new post about the release of their new AWS SDK for PHP that use can use to directly access their web services features from your PHP applications.

The first release supports a large subset of our infrastructure services including the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), the Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3), Amazon CloudFront, Amazon CloudWatch, Amazon SimpleDB, the Amazon Simple Notification Service (SNS), the Amazon Simple Queue Service (SQS), as well as Amazon Identify and Access Management (IAM).

The SDK for PHP includes all of the libraries you'll need to directly access the mentioned services, some code examples to help you get started and some documentation to fill you in on some of the finer points. There's also a few code snippets included in the post to show you a sample SNS connection that creates a topic, subscribes to it and publishes a notification.

Luc De Brouwer has a reminder for web services developers out there - don't forget about backwards compatibility.

About a year ago I was asked by a client to update their existing web service because of some changes in the way they wanted to process their sales data. Luckily this client has always understood the importance of a Service-Oriented Architecture ( SOA ) since they deal with large amounts of resellers who need to access, edit and create data. All I had to do was apply the changes to their web service.

He lists the steps he followed when making the update - thinking about backwards compatibility, evaluating current functionality for use and possibly decommissioning older pieces.

On the Ibuildings techPortal today there's a great overview of web services from Lorna Mitchell covering everything from the HTTP protocol to data formats to REST and SOAP protocols.

In this world of sharing data, increasing numbers of sites and applications are making information available over web services. Whether we are building a service as a feature of our own development, or pulling in the information published by others, we will need to understand the different service types and how to work with them in PHP. This article aims to give you the tools to do just that.

She starts with the basics every web service developer should know - the HTTP spec - and moves from there into things like RPC services, data formats, SOAP messaging, a few debugging tips and finally one of the more talked about technologies these days - REST.

On the Ibuildings techPortal today Vito Chin has posted a new article dealing with PHP and "the Cloud" - where the popular web language fits into the move towards cloud computing.

Cloud computing refers to the utilization of shared, elastic resources and processing power accessed via the Internet. In some ways, it hails the reversion to the golden age of time-sharing but with significant improvements to the distribution philosophies underlying the delivery infrastructure. [...] Cloud-based development involves in some sense, the outsourcing, of various parts of the application out of the server and into the cloud.

Included is an illustration of how an application would interact with the cloud and an example of working with the S3 service that Amazon offers. The example mentions both the normal services and something called the "elastic compute cloud" that lets you use remote services to run virtual instances of other operating systems.

The Zend Developer Zone has published the latest podcast in their PHP Abstract series today - an episode hosted by Davey Shafik talking about web services in PHP.

Today's special guest is Davey Shafik. Davey is a regular on PHP Abstract and I've receited his bio enough so that those of you who listen regularly can probably recite along with me. [...] Today Davey is going to talk to us today about Web Services.

As always, you can either pull down the mp3 by itself and listen to the show right away (or use the embedded player for that matter) or you can subscribe to the feed and get this and other great episodes (including a previous vidcast from Davey) delivered right to your desktop.

The Zend Developer Zone has published the latest podcast in their PHP Abstract series today - an episode hosted by Davey Shafik talking about web services in PHP.

Today's special guest is Davey Shafik. Davey is a regular on PHP Abstract and I've receited his bio enough so that those of you who listen regularly can probably recite along with me. [...] Today Davey is going to talk to us today about Web Services.

As always, you can either pull down the mp3 by itself and listen to the show right away (or use the embedded player for that matter) or you can subscribe to the feed and get this and other great episodes (including a previous vidcast from Davey) delivered right to your desktop.