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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Of the 3,335 developers surveyed by Zend Technologies about what work they expect to do this year, 61 percent said they expect to use a public cloud for their projects. And, of those going that route, 30 percent named Amazon Web Services as their public cloud of choice; 28 percent did not yet know which cloud they would use; 10 percent named Rackspace; and 6 percent cited Microsoft Azure.  ”Other” public clouds came in at 5 percent and IBM Smart Cloud at 3 percent.

These numbers come courtesy of the Zend Developer Pulse. (Zend, a provider of PHP tools,  is the same company that broke the news that a surprising number of PHP developers are also Metallica fans.)

In terms of overall types of projects, a whopping 66 percent of respondents said they will be doing mobile development this year – hardly surprising given the glut of smartphones, tablets and app stores flooding the market.

Forty-one percent said they expect to work on cloud-based development and 40 percent said they see big data work in their immediate future.  Those cloud and big data numbers seem pretty low given the level of interest around both topics but then again “mobile development” is a broad term that could be interpreted to include cloud work.

Nearly half  of those surveyed (48 percent) said they will work on APIs and 45 percent said they will work on social media integration this year. Zend surveyed the developers in November , 2011, and plans to make the Zend Developer Pulse an annual event.

Photo courtesy of Flickr user skuds

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Metallica may not be the house band for PHP programmers, but it comes close. The heavy metal rockers are the group that most PHP coders like to listen to while they work. This is according to a sample of more than 3,000 PHP programmers surveyed by Zend.

The runners-up for most-popular bands were Pink Floyd and Linkin Park.

Other findings: The PHP faithful seem mightily conflicted over Lady Gaga, who showed up in three categories. She was voted the biggest “guilty pleasure” — meaning that programmers listen to her but do so only with headphones — and she was voted one of the least popular vocalists by respondents.

The most loathed artist nod went to teen sensation Justin Bieber, who was followed by both Lady Gaga and Britney Spears (who was also a runner-up in the guilty pleasures category) in the voting.

Zend chief marketing officer Elaine Lennox said the company — which surveys its users every year on weightier matters — got the idea for the music questions after playing Lady Gaga before its conference in October and immediately witnessing an explosion of negative tweets. “The audience went crazy. We played Lady Gaga and apparently the crowd took exception,” she said.

Photo courtesy of Flickr user skuds

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At its core, the RightScale Zend PHP Solution Pack combines the best elements of PaaS and Infrastructure-as-a-Service. Developers get a preconfigured application-development environment composed of Zend’s suite of PHP tools, including Zend Server, and RightScale’s operational automation capabilities. With RightScale, users can choose the underlying public or private cloud infrastructure of their choice and can automate tasks such as infrastructure configuration and scaling.

RightScale CEO Michael Crandell said PHP was a natural area to target. Not only is the community of PHP developers enormous, but it also makes up the largest percentage of RightScale customers. By partnering with Zend, whose Zend Server is a very popular PHP application server, Crandell said the RightScale Zend PHP Solution Pack targets enterprise applications, not early-stage or “toy applications” like some other PaaS offerings appear to target. A big reason for this description is that although standard configurations are available, developers also have the flexibility to customize their applications and infrastructure beyond the high level of abstraction that PaaS typically entails. For example, explained Zend Co-Founder and CEO Andi Gutmans, Zend allows for full lifecycle management, from development to testing to production.

For RightScale, the RightScale Zend PHP Solution Pack represents its second major PaaS effort in as many weeks. Last week, it was announced as a foundational IaaS partner for VMware’s Cloud Foundry PaaS software that supports a variety of languages and frameworks, including Java, Ruby and Node.js.

As developers get more used to cloud computing in all its forms, including PaaS and IaaS, they’re increasingly demanding the flexibility for some degree of control in both application- and infrastructure-level management. Aside from what RightScale is doing with its partners, Amazon Web Services is providing this capability with Elastic Beanstalk and startup DotCloud is offering its own unique take with its namesake cloud platform. The ultimate result, it seems, will be public cloud platforms that cater to all levels of developers as well as to IT types concerned with ensuring security, performance and compliance by being able to lift the hood and customize or monitor infrastructure components, if need be.

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