Recently, with the new Macbook refresh for 2016, many developers have taken a good hard look at whether or not they want to stick with macOS and the hardware. Traditionally Macbook Pros have been an excellent kit to use, and even I used one for travel up until earlier this year. They had powerful CPUs, could be loaded with a good amount of RAM, and had unparalleled battery life. The fact that macOS was built on a Unix subsystem also helped, making it easier for developer tools to be built and worked with thanks to the powerful command line interface.

When it comes to Docker, I use Docker Compose to set up and link all of my containers together. It's rare that I have a single container, though many of my Sculpin-based sites live quite comfortably inside of an nginx container, but even those take advantage of volumes. For a basic three-tiered application, I start off with this basic docker-compose.yml file:

# docker-compose.dev.yml
version: '2'

volumes:
  mysqldata:
    driver: local

services:
  nginx:
    image: nginx
    volumes:
      - ./:/var/www:ro
      - ./app/nginx/default.conf:/etc/nginx/conf.d/default.conf
    links:
      - phpserver

  phpserver:
    build:
      context: ./
      dockerfile: ./phpserver.dockerfile
    working_dir: /var/www/public
    volumes:
      - ./:/var/www/
    links:
      - mysqlserver

  mysqlserver:
    image: mysql
    environment:
      MYSQL_DATABASE: my_db
      MYSQL_USER: my_db
      MYSQL_PASSWORD: password
      MYSQL_ROOT_PASSWORD: rootpassword
    volumes:
      - mysqldata:/var/lib/mysql

  composer:
    entrypoint: /bin/true
    build:
      context: ./
      dockerfile: ./composer.dockerfile
    volumes:
      - ./:/app

Back on December 10th, I launched by first book, Docker for Developers, on Leanpub. One of the things that I kind of glossed over, mostly because it wasn't the focus of the book, was at the the beginning of the "Containerizing Your Application" chapter. It was this:

Another year, another ZendCon. I think I've been to every one since 2008, except for one where they moved it to San Jose for a year. Either way, it has become a staple conference that I look forward to each year, and this year was no exception.

OK, so the title sounds like it comes off as a bit harsh. Today it was announced that RogueWave Software aquired Zend, and RogueWave could now offer and support a full LAMP stack that many enterprise customers were already running. Zend is a staple in the PHP community, with it's founders Andi Gutmans and Zeev Suraski working on the Zend Engine (the thing that turns all of our PHP code into something useful), and Zend's suite of software including Zend Framework, Zend Server, and Zend Studio.