Cloud computing has certainly made an impact on many industries. While medium and large corporations benefited from outsourcing infrastructure to cloud providers – saving on human resources, maintenance and other fixed costs – startups can depend on the cloud as an enabler technology that allows them to behave in a way that is most beneficial for startup companies. –by Vito Chin

Cloud computing has started to move from simple hype to a combination of usefulness and hype. It would seem that the cloud is starting to move in the upwards direction of the Gartner Hype Cycle. Rather than spend time discussing the pros and cons of cloud computing, we will spend our time examining how we can build cloud-based applications in a portable manner. While questions may remain about some of the benefits versus the costs, it is probable that you will, at some point, be writing either cloud-based or cloud-like applications. Here we discuss how you can do that in a portable manner (and we’ll include a pertinent “Spaceballs” reference for good measure). –by Kevin Schroeder

Encryption is one of the cornerstones of the modern day internet. It’s what makes it possible to do online banking and read your email privately, and IPv6 even comes with standard encryption functionality. Without it, the Web would never have become what it is today. Even though most security and encryption techniques are completely transparent to PHP programmers, this article will enlighten you on what it is that actually protects our online identity, finances and innermost secrets. –by Joshua Thijssen

Part 1, in last month’s issue, covered how open source projects attract developers and motivate them to write code for free. That’s nice, but you are not an open source project. You have employees to keep track of, upper management to keep happy, and deadlines to meet all while accounting for the bottom line. How can you take these ideas and make them work for you in the corporate world? –by Cal Evans

Since the focus for the month is cloud computing, I figured I would highlight an exciting project happening in the Drupal world to bring Drupal closer to the cloud. There is no denying the benefits gained from having the scalability and resource-on-demand capabilities of cloud instances, but it has been a long and difficult road for Drupal to match the needs of the emerging cloud environments. That is, until project Mercury. Mercury is an open source server stack that is designed to be run as an image on a cloud environment. –by Adrian Webb

Doing something is not always better than doing nothing. When making your application more secure, make sure you are really improving security, and not just acting like it. –by Arne Blankerts

Building a community, be it a conference or a user group, requires listening to your group members and utilizing the many tools available to you. –by Michelangelo van Dam

The next time you curse the fact that you have to review that horrible code, don’t forget that, somewhere, someone is saying exactly the same thing about yours. –by Marco Tabini

Learn more about trim() –by Elizabeth Tucker Long

Everyone is talking about it, but are you ready to join the cloud? –by Elizabeth Tucker Long