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Monday, 27 October 2008Windows Azure and PHP This week I'm at Microsoft's Professional Developers Conference (PDC2008) in Los Angeles in sunny California (yup, being a CTO is a tough job!). I was invited to this conference by Microsoft (thanks Bram!) because Microsoft is opening up to the PHP community, and I must say that so far they haven't disappointed me. Read what I've learned about what Microsoft is doing with PHP so far. Today was the first day of the conference, which started with a keynote by Ray Ozzie, Chief Software Architect at Microsoft (in other words, he's the successor of Bill Gates). During this keynote, Ray revealed the latest Windows product, dubbed Windows Azure.
Azure is a 'cloud operating system'. It's not something you buy and install on your PC, but it's something that's running online; a service platform that you can host applications on. (Similar to Mosso or Google App Engine). There's currently a limited Beta, open to attendees of the conference, and at first, it will run .NET applications only. Later, it will be able to run native applications. I immediately thought that this would open up the possibility of running PHP on it, and indeed in a later session Microsoft confirmed that it would welcome PHP applications on its cloud. And it's not just theory: in the exhibition area of the conference, Microsoft's Open Source group had an actual demo of Gallery using Azure cloud services. Now they didn't actually run Gallery itself on the cloud yet, but they had modified Gallery to use Azure's storage services to store the photos. From what I understand, the Azure services are all accessible via a clean REST interface, and what the Open Source team (the team that has PHP community people like Joe Stagner and Pierre Joye on board) did was create a set of PHP classes that wrap the API so it's easy to use in PHP. I hope they will make these PHP libraries available for download soon, so I can try it with the Azure beta program. So it's pretty cool stuff so far, and it's nice to see that Microsoft is actively supporting PHP on their new platforms. I'm looking forward to the rest of the conference. If there's any more news related to PHP, I'll post it on this blog. Share         Reacties
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Ivo,
I am glad you are enjoying PDC. I hope that what you saw was a pleasant surprise. It was a pleasure talking to you last week. Hank.
I've become a realist over the past several years, especially where PHP is concerned, thus far Zend/PHP has jumped in bed with IBM, Sun and Microsoft - Yet none of these relationship have made significant contributions to the PHP Core functionality.
Hi K,
well, actually quite some significant contributions have come out of those partnerships. With Microsoft for example, the PHP core developers are working to make PHP 5.3 run even faster and better on Windows, and Microsoft has recently contributed mssql support to AdoDB. IBM for example, has invested heavily in the PHP testfests that were done earlier this year, and the outcome of this is a large set of unittests that the core developers use to assure the quality of new PHP releases.
Actually, the 5.3 work we did was directly with the community.
5.3 is the most signifficant change for PHP on the Windows platform in many years. If you check out that work you will see that it has been signifficant. And we are working on many more things.
Completely agree with K. They join the relationship with Microsoft and nothing comes out!
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