DragonBe's PHP blog

I started these series on Zend Framework Apps on Windows Azure and maybe it's nice to know I'll be at the PHPBenelux Conference 2012 Microsoft Hackathon where I'll be joined by Windows Azure MVP Maarten Balliauw, Katrien De Graeve and Craig Kitterman of Microsoft and offer you the opportunity to hack on the PHP tools Microsoft and partners have developped to integrate your apps on the various Microsoft platforms.

Even if you have no knowledge of any of Microsoft's PHP solutions you're more then happy to join us and see how you can build applications so they can be distributed with the Web Platform Installer for running on Windows IIS servers.

Or maybe you just ended up with a new job in a company that only runs Windows Servers. We'll explain what you need to do so your applications run smoothly on these Microsoft IIS infrastructures.

And of course we'll have a look at Windows Azure, the cloud solution of Microsoft that allows you to develop PHP apps for the…

Building web applications is nothing new anymore, as we've been doing it since the early days of the internet, but we've always done this on a single system. Even when Zend Framework came round, we kept doing the same thing and build apps for a single environment.
But as I've discussed already in my previous article, developing for the cloud requires another approach. As you can see, your system now falls appart into all different components that are systems by themselves. And each system has its own purpose, completely independent from each other.
With Zend Framework developing applications running on these separate compontents becomes really easy. It's like having your cloud toolbox right in your pocket.
DatabasesWith Zend Framework, connecting to databases is really easy and swapping out a database brand is just a matter of modifying your configuration application/configs/application.ini.
resources.db.adapter = "pdo_mysql"
resources.db.params.host = "10.2…

IntroductionSince a couple of years the term "cloud" has moved from simple buzz-word to real business opportunities that make a difference within the market. The technology behind "cloud" is not new as we've grown accustomed to server clusters, distributed datacenters and separation of responsibilities, but the "cloud" offers everyone the opportunity to scale and not just the companies who have a huge cash reserve to purchase another rack with servers.The strange thing is that cloud is being provided by companies you wouldn't expect to serve it. Best known are Amazon.com and Rackspace.com that offers a complete set of services you can use to run applications in the cloud, they provide the infrastructure and you have to set up and maintain your platform and infrastructure. Microsoft also jumped on this cloud hype offering a platform in the cloud. And this is exactly the reason it caught my attention and got me interested. I'm a developer and I…