Of the 4,809 PHP developers surveyed in the Developer Pulse, Star Wars was top dog; followed by (gasp) Avatar; then Star Trek.

Here’s the data:

Previous Developer Pulse results showed beer to be the preferred adult beverage for developers — 29 percent of whom said they “live for it” last year. And in 2011, we learned that Metallica reigned supreme among musical choices. On the flip side, respondents that year showed a strong resistance to Bieber fever as well as a pronounced ambivalence about Lady Gaga.

Feature photo courtesy of Flickr user Eva Rinaldi Celebrity and Live Music Photographer

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The company started out as PHPfog, which GigaOM’s Derrick Harris characterized two years ago as a sort of Heroku for PHP developers, but changed focus to support multiple languages and multiple public clouds.

The developers using PHPFog probably already know it’s not  easy to migrate from one software version to another and when the software in question is actually the platform which runs your applications, things get really hairy. One AppFog user acknowledged that the company provided notice and guidance about migrating applications but said any such migration is fraught. “Infrastructure moves are incredibly difficult and risky and the upside is usually fairly slim,” he said via email.

We'd love to keep in touch… so please follow @AppFog as we wind down here…. It's been freaking awesome.—
PHP Fog (@phpfog) January 23, 2013

The problem of a defunct PaaS may be rare — Coghead disappeared in 2009, although SAP ended up buying the intellectual property. But given that PaaSes act as platforms for real applications, customers need to go into deployment with their eyes wide open.

Gartner distinguished analyst Yefim Natiz, who studies this topic, recommends that PaaS customers negotiate terms to mitigate risk. “You should put something in your provisions that if the company is acquired or goes away, you can get some money back — even if a company goes bankrupt there are assets left over. The best thing is to get your code in escrow so if the PaaS goes away you can run it on premises if you need to,” he said.

And of course, all companies should always back up their underlying data all the time.

Carlson, who provided the tweetstream below to show how some customers “evolved” their thinking about the transition, said the benefits of moving to AppFog outweigh the headaches of the move itself.

“They get much better service, a choice of infrastructure, new languages, five new database services and can choose whatever version control system they want to manage their code instead of being forced into Git,” he said in an interview.

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The stated goal of this move is to let other groups —  state, local or foreign governments or non governmental organizations (NGOs)  –  use the same code, adjusted for their constituencies. The application uses Drupal, the open source content management system, MySQL, MongoDB and PHP, and the code is covered under the GNU General Public License.

Several government agencies, including the Federal Communications Commission, NASA, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and the General Services Administration, also use GitHub as a code repository for  various projects, according to the publication FedScoop.

The Obama Administration launched the We The People portal last September as a way for citizens to register their own views and find or launch petitions. A quick review of the site shows petitions asking the administration to implement no-fly zone over Syria (231 signatures) and to  release the recipe for the White House’s home-brewed honey ale (4,167 signatures.)

The release of the source code is part of the administration’s bigger plan to push big data and “open data” as a way to streamline and cut costs.

To see how the application works, check out the video.

Feature photo courtesy of  Flickr user Tom Lohdan

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Last December, Uhuru launched a beta its PaaS but went back to add a new management console and integration to  popular applications including WordPress (see disclosure), SugarCRM and Magento and its own file storage service. Users of some other PaaSes rely on Amazon  S3 storage. The revamped AppCloud Ready to Go was available as a private beta in late June and has since signed 1,100 developers, Surkan said.

Uhuru was founded by two Microsoft veterans: Jawak Khaki, a former corporate VP, and Jawaid Ekram, former GM of Live Meeting services.

Uhuru’s service competes with ActiveState’s Stackato, AppFog and Tier3, which are offering cross-platform Cloud Foundry-based PaaSes of their own. There is some debate, however, about whether multi-platform PaaSes really are better than their language-specific counterparts. Companies like ActiveState, Apprenda  and AppHarbor are pitching their .NET platforms as providing better, deeper integration and support of that Microsoft technology.

Disclosure: Automattic, the maker of WordPress, is backed by True Ventures, a venture capital firm that is an investor in the parent company of this blog, Giga Omni Media. Om Malik, founder of Giga Omni Media, is also a venture partner at True.

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The biggest takeaways from the study, which is a must-read for developers and a must-skim for entrepreneurs building consumer-facing startups (seriously, the section on lessons learned and how to hire coders applies to y’all), are how it moved from a traditional open source Linux Apache, MySQL and PHP base to using a thin veneer of PHP code on top of bleeding-edge languages such as Scala and Finagle. The post notes that, while newer noSQL data stores like HBase and Redis are used, the bulk of the data is currently stored in a heavily partitioned MySQL set up and there is no plan to replace MySQL with HBase.

The story is familiar to those who have followed the infrastructure progressions of Facebook and Twitter, and many of the tools Tumblr uses are open-source contributions from those grandaddies of webscale. But the post digs into a problem that is somewhat unique to Tumblr, in that it runs two different types of services, one that looks more like a constantly updating network of user statuses such as Twitter and another that is more like a Facebook page with a huge social graph for each writer that Tumblr must track. The implications for Tumblr’s architecture are huge. From the post:

Users form a connection with other users so they will go hundreds of pages back into the dashboard to read content. Other social networks are just a stream that you sample. …

• Public Tumblelog is what the public deals with in terms of a blog. Easy to cache as it’s not that dynamic.
• Dashboard is similar to the Twitter timeline. Users follow real-time updates from all the users they follow.
• Very different scaling characteristics than the blogs. Caching isn’t as useful because every request is different, especially with active followers.
• Needs to be real-time and consistent. Should not show stale data. And it’s a lot of data to deal with. Posts are only about 50GB a day. Follower-list updates are 2.7TB a day.

Aside from the technical issues, entrepreneurs can learn from this case study because Tumblr is trying to solve more general problems around hiring talent in NYC (it has high hopes for Mayor Bloomberg’s efforts to bolster the tech community), understanding how to conduct job interviews to find good coders and how to slowly try out new technologies at small scale before moving them over to the entire production environment. Really, the post is long, but it’s good. Go read it.

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There is definitely more interest in PaaS by developers who don’t want to worry about hardware and software infrastructure — the scaffolding of development. They want to focus on their key concern: developing and deploying applications.

Engine Yard started out as a Ruby-oriented PaaS but added support for other languages including PHP via its acquisition of Orchestra last August.  In November, the company plugged the popular Node.js server-side framework into its PaaS as well.

The demand for PaaSes may be growing but so is the number of contenders for that business. Engine Yard competes with multi-language PaaS from AppFog and Heroku, now part of Salesforce.com and VMware’s Cloud Foundry.  (Some other PaaS players still concentrate on supporting one language well — as Cloudbees does with Java.)

Mike Piech, VP of product management and marketing, for Engine Yard, said there’s plenty of business to go around as more companies, and different types of companies, move workloads to PaaS. “If you think of the value of PaaS, you’re offloading everything except the app itself — the load balancing, the application servers, the web infrastructure to someone else so you can focus on innovation and time to market — that’s valuable to many types of companies,” he said.

Early traction came mostly from Web 2.0 companies but now Piech said enterprises of all kinds are hiring developers to work on their behalf using PaaS infrastructure.

He said there might be a shake out in the segment but said that will affect lower-end, less mature options. “We’ve been in the business six years, through a couple of generations of PaaS. We’ve built the expertise and our clients have grown up with us,” he said.

While industry giants VMware and Salesforce.com have built (or bought) PaaS power, other huge contenders include Microsoft with its Windows Azure service. Given all that consolidation, it will be interesting to see how smaller, independent players like Engine Yard will fare going forward.

Photo courtesy of Flickr user dandeluca

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It’s not surprising that respondents had a NoSQL bent given that Couchbase recruited them from Twitter (using the NoSQL hashtag), InfoQ as well as the company’s own database. Still, some of the results were interesting.

NoSQL (or not only SQL) databases, which do not rely on the SQL query language commonly used in relational databases from Oracle,  Microsoft, and IBM, got their start in webscale companies like Google and Yahoo that needed their ability to scale out across multiple servers. MongoDB, Cassandra are other NoSQL databases.

Of those planning to make the transition, the biggest motivation was disdain for the inflexible schemas that are part-and-parcel of SQL databases, according to the survey. Nearly half (49 percent) of those surveyed said schemas drove them to NoSQL. The second biggest factor, cited by 35 percent, was the inability of relational databases to handle scale-out data.

One of NoSQL’s biggest draws is that users don’t have to scope out their data fields — name, phone number, state — in advance and then be held captive to those schemas.

It was striking that the language cited by most of NoSQL-loving respondents was Java, followed closely by PHP, then C#.  ”That could be surprising that the favorite was not Ruby or the bleeding-edge funky languages,” said James Phillips, Couchbase co-founder and SVP of products.

NoSQL is definitely gaining traction but the pure-play NoSQL players will see increasing competition from the RDBMS world as well. Virtually all the RDBMS players including Oracle are coming out with their own NoSQL plays.

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The free version of Jaspersoft’s analytics will be offered as part of Red Hat’s evolving OpenShift Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS).

As Red Hat, Microsoft, Salesforce.com’s Heroku, and VMware’s Cloud Foundry PaaS products compete, they’ll add more services and capabilities to the mix just as they’ve raced to add support for all the major programming languages. Jaspersoft will bring an important piece of the puzzle — business intelligence — to OpenShift. Since the deal isn’t exclusive, look for Jaspersoft to add other PaaS products over time — and for OpenShift to shop around as well.

There’s a lot of potential upside here for these analytics vendors. New Gartner research  says by the end of 2013, just 3 percent of business intelligence (BI) revenue will come from cloud-based offerings, although nearly every analytics vendor has one.  Adoption just isn’t there yet, and deals like this could help in that regard.

Developers wanting to build BI into their applications can try out the free community edition of Jaspersoft on OpenShift and move up to the higher end professional or enterprise versions as their needs dictate, said Karl Van den Bergh, VP of product and alliances for Jaspersoft.

The endgame for Jaspersoft — and its rivals — is to get their services in front of as many developers as possible. OpenShift, which targets Java and PHP developers in particular but supports other languages as well, will help do that. “There is no barrier to entry. It’s free for developers that want to build BI into their applications to get started,” he said.

Jaspersoft does not offer a hosted BI PaaS on its own, although it does have JaspersoftLive, a hosted version of its software, on its web site for developers to try out, but not buy, Van den Bergh said.

It’s still early in the PaaS race — OpenShift and CloudFoundry for example, are still in beta — but as the companies that back these efforts seek credibility among developers watch for more services and applications to be added to their platforms in what looks to be the next arms race in cloud services.

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