July CTP of PHP SDK for Windows Azure Released and support in Zend Framework

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[Update: Maarten Balliauw has posted some samples. You'll see how easy it is to use the SDK:  PHP SDK for Windows Azure - Milestone 2 release ]  

I am pleased to communicate the availability of July Technology Preview of PHP SDK for Windows Azure.  As part of Microsoft’s continued commitment to interoperability, we announced the open source PHP SDK for Windows Azure in May in collaboration with our development partner RealDolmen.

There are two key activities that I am excited about in this release:

  • Submission of PHP SDK for Windows Azure to Zend Framework
  • Feature completion of Windows Azure Table Storage APIs in PHP

We received good feedback in the past couple of months and have addressed a few defects in the blob storage as well.

Submission of PHP SDK for Windows Azure to Zend Framework

Microsoft & RealDolmen have decided to make PHP SDK for Windows Azure available as part of Zend Framework. By extending support for Windows Azure through Zend Framework, millions of PHP developers that use Zend Framework can build web applications seamlessly targeting Windows Azure. Realdolmen has formally submitted the July CTP repository to Zend Framework’s laboratories to begin the review and approval process. Upon approval, Zend Framework will publish a technology preview package of the SDK on the Zend Framework website.  We will continue to work closely with Zend to ensure consistency across the standalone and Zend Framework versions of the PHP SDK for Windows Azure.

I worked with Zend when we demonstrated information card interoperability on PHP based web applications through Zend Information card (read this to see it in action) and continue to enjoy the great working experience.  I look forward to the release for PHP Support for Windows Azure in Zend Framework.

Support for Table Storage.

The Windows Azure Table service offers structured storage in the form of tables which contain a set of Entities, which contains a set of named Properties. A Few highlights of Windows Azure Table are

  • Compile time type checking when using the ADO .NET Data Services client library.
  • A rich set of data types for property values.
  • Support for unlimited number of tables and entities, with no limit on the table size.
  • Strong consistency for single entity transactions.
  • Optimistic concurrency for updates and deletes.

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The Table service exposes a REST API.  The PHP classes for the Table service provide developers with an abstraction upon the REST APIs for CRUD and Query operations. Some of the features supported in this milestone are:

  • SharedKey Lite authentication (for local table storage service from SDK)
  • Query, Create, Delete & Update Tables - Enumerates the tables in a storage account.
  • Query, Create, Delete & Update Entities - Queries data in a table.
  • Batch Transactions

Detailed usage scenarios of Table Storage can be found here

Please note that you need to have the May CTP of Windows Azure to take advantage of the features in this release of PHP SDK for Windows Azure.

- Vijay Rajagopalan