Microsoft has announced a new set of interoperability projects involving
PHP, including a new open-source software development kit that enables interoperability
for PHP developers who want to work with Microsoft's Windows cloud services
platform.
The PHPAzure SDK will be
available as a CTP (Community Technology Preview) free download on CodePlex,
the Microsoft-hosted open-source software development Website. It can be found
here.
Microsoft has previously released open-source SDKs for developers working in
Java and Ruby and has said it will also be releasing other SDKs.
The PHPAzure project enables PHP developers to take advantage of the Windows
Azure cloud services platform and provides a consistent programming model for
Windows Azure Storage, including blobs, tables and queues, Microsoft said.
The PHP SDK for Windows Azure project is being driven by RealDolmen and
Microsoft, with Microsoft providing the funding for the effort. RealDolmen is a
Microsoft partner in Belgium.
In a blog post, Maarten
Balliauw, a .NET software engineer at RealDolmen, said:
I'm on the thin line between the
Microsoft development environment (.NET) and
PHP development environment, and I really like bridging the two together (think
PHPExcel, PHPLinq). And cheap, distributed hosting of data (be it file or
databases) is always interesting to use, especially in web applications where
you may store anything your users upload.
Peter
Galli, Microsoft's open-source community manager, said Vijay Rajagopalan, a
principal architect at Microsoft, demonstrated the PHPAzure technology at
TechEd India during the week of May 11.
Said Galli in a blog post:
The PHP SDK for Windows Azure focuses
on REST [Representational State Transfer] and provides PHP classes for Windows
Azure blobs, tables and queue, helper classes for HTTP transport, AuthN/AuthZ,
REST and error management, as well as manageability, instrumentation and
logging support.
Rajagopalan will also announce the
launch of a series of projects that offer samples and a toolkit that enable PHP
developers to include Silverlight controls, Microsoft Virtual Earth maps and IE
WebSlices and Accelerators in PHP web applications; as well as automatically
generated a simple "Create, Read, Update, Delete (CRUD)" PHP
application from a table in SQL Server.
Microsoft also announced a series of open-source projects that offer samples
and tool kits that enable PHP developers to easily include Microsoft
technologies in their Web applications, including Silverlight, Internet
Explorer 8 WebSlices and Accelerators, SQL Server, and Virtual Earth, the
company said.
Galli said the PHPAzure SDK is being "released under a BSD license,
while a functionally complete version of the SDK, which will support
tables and queues, should be available for download by this fall of 2009, but
the team is calling on developers to provide feature requests, test the tool
kit and join the user forum."
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