I think it's cool to have great PHP support on Heroku. PHP doesn't always get much love from a lot of the developer community, but it has its place and if nothing else, Heroku support means you can migrate your app there from a shared Dreamhost account if it ever blows up.<p>It's good to have options.
For anyone looking to get into PHP development now, check out Laravel:<p><a href="http://laravel.com/" rel="nofollow">http://laravel.com/</a><p>It's a Rails-like framework for PHP, and seems to be pretty well designed. I wouldn't start a new PHP project without it.
PHP will be a tough market to enter for Heroku. It will be especially hard to attract owners of small PHP based sites. Almost every traditional, shared hosting provider supports PHP, prices are really low and setup is trivial (just dump PHP files in your public_html folder, set DB connection string and you're done). For larger sites, when scalability and availability become a significant issue, Heroku platform may be appealing.
Is this a strategy to increase the market potential of Heroku? It was mainly meant for "super fast rails" development and deployment, so I'm wondering why Heroku is targeting PHP.<p>Some would say its part of their "all platforms" deal, but then I'd argue its not much different than AWS. I'm wondering if they can bring some of the large portion of PHP websites that still run today onto their platform as a way to increase active and paying users.
Here's another post as well in relation to our support where we look back at where PHP comes from, but also where it's heading - <a href="https://blog.heroku.com/archives/2014/4/29/php_a_look_back_a_look_forward" rel="nofollow">https://blog.heroku.com/archives/2014/4/29/php_a_look_back_a...</a>
plug: i'm co-founder of PHP-only-PaaS fortrabbit — seeing Heroku move in our direction shows me that we are doing something right. We see a lot of momentum in the PHP community — some call it a PHP renaissance. Laravel, Composer and lately Facebooks input with HHVM (& Hack) are the cornerstones. Of course PHP is not everyones cup of tea, but something to be taken seriously.
This isn't "the new PHP", and I hope it is amended. Facebook making their own runtime by no means makes it newer than the official version produced by the PHP contributors/zend team until (if ever) it makes it into the core.
I used Heroku for hosting my php site (<a href="http://sea-hag.net" rel="nofollow">http://sea-hag.net</a>) for a while on the free tier. It was OK, but the DB add-ons were all pretty terrible (even on the lower pay tiers). In the end, I ended up getting a VPS and hosting it on that. Now it's lightning fast and I can't complain.<p>Heroku held its own for a while. I'd recommend it if you need to do some quick testing and get people on it to start, but I wouldn't pay for it.
Can't get over the way first sentence sounds:<p>> PHP developers are makers at heart.<p>What is the difference between a PHP developer and any other developer? If they tried to stick this in the middle, I could swallow it but opening sentence is just ridiculous.