AppFog's company blog covers its platform-as-a-service, with tutorials, NoOps, Node.js in the enterprise, and Docker.
HN commenters link it for the NoOps explanation, Node.js enterprise adoption, and PaaS versus VPS cost, and one criticizes its dropping of git support.
I think you're right about a lot of things. Things like Backbone (which I wrote about at http://blog.appfog.com/putting-some-mvc-meat-into-your-app-backbone-js/) will make recourse to the back end more and more selective as time goes by. JavaScript is indeed quite a force, and as far as I can tell that will stop only when browsers start reading other languages directly (which is not completely unthinkable, but also not really on the horizon).
My point was not directed so much against JavaScript as against the notion that PHP is simply an anachronism.
There's also nothing stopping you from using lots and lots of front-end JavaScript in a PHP-driven context...
I'm seeing a lot of comments talking about "just get a {VPS, dedicate box, Amazon, etc...}". I think people are missing the point. AppFog is trying to take all the "hard" work out of SysOps. Think Chef on crack, you are paying for their pre-configured infrastructure from the top down.
Their idea is provide a powerful, scaleable platform quickly and easily. Their mentality is called NoOps (http://blog.appfog.com/what-is-noops-anyhow/). It's a cheesy marketing term, and pissed a lot of people off, but it's pretty spot on for what their service offers.
I don't know any Ruby beyond absolute basics, and definitely didn't need to use it to get started.
If you're using OS X or Linux, just run these 3 commands in a Terminal:
sudo gem install af
af login
af update [appname]
to upload your app.
See here for more details
http://blog.appfog.com/getting-started-with-appfogs-command-line/
But you can get started with things like Wordpress or Drupal without touching the appfog client, see here for a list of "jumpstarts"
http://docs.appfog.com/getting-started/jumpstarts
appfog.com also has outages as well - http://blog.appfog.com/october-27th-downtime-postmortem/ - when going with public cloud, your app's well being is always in 3rd party hands. If you want to mitigate the risk, host your own private PaaS on your own infrastructure - then you can only point your finger at yourself when outages occur.
We're dogfooding at AppFog. We self-host our web management console (see http://blog.appfog.com/creating-your-first-app-in-appfog-in-under-5-minutes/).
When we needed a staging environment, it was just an `af push` away.
Purely informative but it seems you can add commit hooks to your version control to connect to theirs: http://blog.appfog.com/553/
Seems pretty stupid to drop support of git in favor of their own product.