Amazon Web Services (AWS) has released a toolkit to make it easier to develop applications in PHP that will run on Amazon's cloud, the company said on Wednesday.
Using the AWS SDK for PHP, which works with PHP 5.2 or later versions, developers can build applications that use different parts of Amazon's cloud, including Simple Storage Service (S3), Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) for computing capacity, and the SimpleDB database.
The SDK (software development kit) is based on the CloudFusion toolkit and includes a library of APIs (application programming interfaces), code samples and documentation. It should simplify development by providing a more "tailored development experience", and will help developers get started much faster, according to Amazon. Previously, developers had to download several libraries from different providers in order to build an application on multiple AWS products, the company said.
In March the creator of CloudFusion, Ryan Parman, joined Amazon to be able to focus exclusively on improving the software. With Amazon's resources he has been able to make "tremendous strides in improving nearly every aspect of the project", Parman said on the CloudFusion website, where he also answers more questions about the changes that the AWS SDK for PHP brings, including a switch from a BSD license to Apache 2.0. http://getcloudfusion.com/
Amazon is also providing a guide that explains how to migrate from CloudFusion 2.5 to AWS SDK for PHP.
Parman is now spending all his efforts of the the AWS SDK for PHP, but CloudFusion will continue to exist as an open project, he said.
Amazon's cloud has language-agnostic web service APIs that can be used by any number of programming languages. For those who want more support, however, Amazon also offers developer kits for Java and Microsoft's .NET in addition to the new PHP SDK.
The AWS SDK for PHP can be downloaded from Amazon's website.