Microsoft Launches PHP Tools for Windows Azure

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."