All of the PHP developers from Edmonds Commerce made our annual pilgramage over the Pennines to Manchester this weekend to visit arguably one of the best PHP conferences around – PHP North West, PHPNW for short.

This is a three track conference with a diverse range of expert PHP developers giving presentations on some really interesting topics. The team split up and chose their own route through the choice of talks meaning that between us all we got a real flavour of the entire conference.

They Keynote by Ade Oshineye was all to do with API development and DevX – developer experience as opposed to the more usual and in vogue UX – user experience. The point being that users are often getting a lot of thought put into their experiences but developers are often given sparsely documented and unwieldy APIs to work with. The metaphor of a door with an ambiguous push/pull requirement was really apt.

Particular highlights for me included the ReactPHP talk by Igor Wiedler which was both entertaining and really informative. The ØMQ (zero MQ) layer looks really interesting among other things. The guys that went to the Data structures talk by Patrick Allaert were really impressed with that.

Take homes from the conference in terms of projects and technologies to keep an eye on include the following:

Composer

Silex Framework

React PHP

ØMQ

Amazon Web Services Command Line Tools

In a follow up to our popular blog post describing the process of getting AMTU 1 set up on a Centos server, this post describes how to get the latest version 2 of AMTU running.

Things have moved on and thankfully it is a lot easier than it was.

Firstly get Sun Java installed. You will need to get the URL for downloading the RPM from here:

http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/java/javase/downloads/jre7-downloads-1637588.html

Accept the agreement, download the correct RPM version and then pause it. Copy the download URL and paste it into this command:

cd /tmp
wget [paste-url]-here]
rpm - jre [hit tab to complete]

Now check the correct java version is being used:

java -version

You should get something looking like:

[root@94 tmp]# java -version
java version "1.7.0_05"
Java(TM) SE Runtime Environment (build 1.7.0_05-b06)
Java HotSpot(TM) 64-Bit Server VM (build 23.1-b03, mixed mode)

Now you can install AMTU

wget https://d28hcfptedr5ia.cloudfront.net/install/AMTU_unix.sh
chmod +x AMTU_unix.sh
./AMTU_unix.sh

Keep hitting enter to get to the bottom of the terms and then agree, agree to all the other options. That is AMTU installed.

The final step is to configure this using the CLI configure utitlity.

You need to create an xml file for the AMTU configuration. You can see a sample file in /opt/amtu/xml/sample.xml.

Lets copy that file and then edit it accordingly.

cd /opt/amtu/xml
cp sample.xml configuration.xml
vim configuration.xml

You do need to be signed up for MWS to get some of the keys etc that are required. If not already, go to this page and hit the sign up button.

https://developer.amazonservices.co.uk/index.html

Once you have updated the XML configuration you run this command to apply it:

/opt/amtu/Utilities/configure SETUP /opt/amtu/xml/configuration.xml

If you get some error messages at this point, edit the configuration and try again. Once you have the configuration set you can start the daemon.

/opt/AMTU/Utilities/amtu_daemon start

Easily deploy PHP applications to the Amazon Web Services infrastructure allowing you to take advantage of an easily scaled flexible cloud based system.

Furthermore there is Git based deployment so your version control workflow can hook directly into deployment for speed and convenience.

This does really look attractive. The Angry birds store recently launched on Magento using Varnish and Amazon Web Services and it runs very fast indeed. Perhaps the days of expensive dedicated hardware are really numbered. If its this easy to set something up that can perform as well as a complex server cluster at a fraction of the cost.

http://aws.typepad.com/aws/2012/03/aws-elastic-beanstalk-build-php-apps-using-git-based-deployment.html

Edmonds Commerce are hiring at the moment.

PHP Job Leeds

We are always looking to grow our team of Leeds based professional PHP Developers. If you are at or around the Zend Certified Developer level and think you would pass the exam given a little time and preparation then please get in touch.

Administration Job Leeds

At the moment we are also looking for someone to join the team to help with administration and general customer services requirements. There is the possibility for this role to grow to meet your personal skills and ambitions.

For either role, please visit the Job Application form to apply for a Job in Leeds.