I’ve wanted to play with Google App Engine (GAE) for years. Between its SLA, automatic scaling, and a variety of other aspects, it’s always been an intriguing option. Unfortunately, since support was exclusively for Python and Java, it wasn’t an option, so when Google announced PHP support for GAE, it was exciting and intriguing. I dove in. –by Keith Casey

Package management for PHP has historically been a bit of a mess. For the longest time, it was just: download a package, throw it somewhere, and then require the needed files. This worked OK, but you were never really sure about the quality of the packages. PEAR came along and gave us a centralized repository for code and a pretty decent way to install it. The big issue was that the packages available through the PEAR project were minuscule compared to the large amount of third-party libraries out there in the wild. A few years ago, a new project popped up named Composer, which aimed to get rid of the issues plaguing package management. In 2013, it has become pretty much the standard way to install and distribute packages in PHP. –by Chris Tankersley

There’s a growing movement in the PHP community around unit testing, and there are a growing number of resources that arm developers with the information needed to write tests. One of the key concepts to writing useful tests is mocking dependencies. In order to ensure each test is focused on a small unit of code, it’s important to eliminate fail points that exist outside of the code being tested. –by Matt Frost

As a PHP developer, we are used to working with dependencies. Most projects rely on third-party components or even entire frameworks like Zend Framework or Symfony. We can add and manage these dependencies in our projects using Composer. Let’s see how we can work with Composer from within our IDE: PhpStorm. –by Maarten Balliauw

The ecosystem around PHP is continually evolving. More and more, developers are relying on other pieces of software and technology outside of the traditional LAMP stack. The concept of installing everything locally is now more complex as these new solutions are not always cross-platform compatible, which is a hassle when a team of developers are working on different platforms. Vagrant can help tame your development environment setup woes. –by Jeremy Quinton

This month, we’re going to be continuing on where we left off last month and working through a selection of the rest of the API. Specifically, we’ll be covering the following customers, discount coupons, monthly subscriptions, and webhooks. –by Matthew Setter

I wanted to switch topics for this month’s magazine and begin to talk about product development. (This stems from some recent discussions and experiences in the consulting side of the musketeers.me business, but pulls on experiences from decades working in all types of projects and companies, government, corporate, academic, nonprofit, startups, and consulting.) –by Eli White

“Don’t reinvent the wheel.” “Don’t waste time; use existing libraries.” I can’t even count how many times I have heard this advice in various forms, but reusing code means relying on external resources, and external resources add their own brand of complexity. –by Beth Tucker Long