Announcing PHP SDK for Windows Azure… and much more!

I’ve just arrived at TechEd India where I’m going to talk about interoperability in my sessions “Build Mission Critical Applications on the Microsoft Platform Using Eclipse, Java & Ruby” and “Developing PHP Applications using Microsoft Software & Services”. In addition to presenting the on-going activities that Microsoft is driving to strengthen interoperability, I’m excited to be able to demo a new set of interoperability projects related to PHP. I’m going to give you a glimpse of these projects in this post for those that are unable to join us in India.

The first PHP interoperability bridge that we’re announcing is the PHP SDK for Windows Azure. This SDK is the result of an open source development project by RealDolmen, for which Microsoft is providing funding. I’d like to personally thank Maarten Balliauw of RealDolmen for his work on the project. The goal of the SDK is to provide high-level abstractions that enable PHP developers to interoperate readily with Windows Azure.

Keep in mind that the Azure Services Platform has been designed to be open, standards-based and interoperable.

The Azure Services Platform’s support for XML, REST and SOAP standards means that any of the Azure services can be called from other platforms and programming languages. To facilitate the interoperability between the Azure Services Platform and non-Microsoft languages and technologies, Microsoft has  provided funding for two other SDK projects that support 3rd party programming languages: Java SDK for Microsoft .NET Services and Ruby SDK for Microsoft .NET Services

The PHP SDK for Windows Azure focuses on REST and provides the following core features:

  • PHP classes for Windows Azure blobs, tables & queues
  • Helper Classes for HTTP transport, AuthN/AuthZ, REST & error management
  • Manageability, instrumentation & logging support

PHP-Vijay-AzureSDK1

Windows Azure is the foundation of the Azure Services Platform and it includes the services hosting environment for the platform. At MIX 2009, Microsoft announced the inclusion of FastCGI in Windows Azure’s hosting environment. The FastCGI protocol enables developers to run web applications on Windows Azure that were written using 3rd party programming languages including PHP. This opens up new options for PHP developers to deploy their applications. For example, in the context of the PHP SDK for Windows Azure you have the 2 following options for deploying your PHP web applications:

PHP-Vijay-AzureSDK2-deploy

A Technology Preview of the PHP SDK for Windows Azure will be released by RealDolmen under a “BSD” license. This version of the SDK supports interoperability with Windows Azure blog storage. A functionally complete version of the SDK – additionally supporting tables and queues - is expected to be available from the download project site by the fall of 2009. Of course you're welcomed to try out and provide suggestions & feedback to the project by joining the user forum.

The second piece of announcement, I’m excited to make is the launch of a series of third party projects that offer samples and toolkit that enable PHP developers to easily include in their web applications the following Microsoft technologies:

Projects

Features for PHP developers

Embedding Silverlight in PHP

Include Silverlight controls in PHP web applications  PHP-Vijay-SL

Web Slices and Accelerators in PHP

Include IE Webslices & Accelerators in PHP web applications PHP-Vijay-webslice

SQL CRUD Application Wizard for PHP

Automatically generated a simple “Create, Read, Update, Delete (CRUD)” PHP application from a table in SQL Server PHP-Vijay-crudsql

Virtual Earth Integration Kit for PHP

Include Microsoft Virtual Earth maps in PHP web applications 8

Microsoft is providing funding for a series of projects, of which this first batch have been developed by Accenture. The third party projects are available on Codeplex.com under a BSD license:

More to come; stay tuned and once again I encourage you to take a look. Feedback is very welcomed.

Vijay Rajagopalan, Principal Architect, Microsoft Corp.