Port 25: The Open Source Community at Microsoft : Community, Interop, Web

Zend Launches Open Source Initiative to Drive Cloud Application Development

Peter Galli — Tue, 22 Sep 2009 14:00:00 GMT

Today, Zend Technologies announced the Simple API for Cloud Application Services project, which is a new open source initiative that allows developers to use common application services in the cloud, while enabling them to unlock value-added features available from individual providers.

This new project is designed to encourage widespread participation and contributions from the open source community, resulting in the availability of Simple Cloud API adapters for virtually all major cloud providers.

Zend, Microsoft, IBM, Nirvanix, Rackspace and GoGrid are all co-founding contributors to this community project, which aims to facilitate the development of cloud applications that can access services on all major cloud platforms and whose initial goal is to provide a set of programming interfaces for PHP developers to facilitate the development of applications that have basic cloud storage needs.

The first deliverables will include interfaces for file storage, document database, and simple queue services from platforms like Amazon Web Services, Windows Azure, Nirvanix Storage Delivery Network and Rackspace Cloud Files, allowing developers to deploy software applications to access services in these environments without making time consuming and expensive changes to their source code.

As Andi Gutmans, the CEO at Zend Technologies, notes in the press release announcing the project, "cloud computing offers irresistible value to enterprises of all sizes, but the lack of portability across cloud application services for even the most basic operations has been an impediment to broader adoption of cloud services."

An initial Simple Cloud API proposal and reference implementation is already available now for community review and participation, while a technology preview of the PHP client libraries for Windows Azure can be found here.

Microsoft is also contributing Simple Cloud API adapters, along with the official PHP client libraries for Windows Azure storage, to future versions of Zend Framework. These adapters will allow applications to take advantage of many Windows Azure features through the Simple Cloud API interface, while Microsoft's client libraries will put Windows Azure innovations, such as transaction and partial upload support, at the fingertips of cloud application developers.

"The Simple Cloud API is an example of Microsoft's continued investment in the openness and interoperability of its platform. We're excited to see how this project will foster adoption of cloud computing platforms by PHP developers and hope that many of these developers are encouraged to use Windows Azure," Doug Hauger, the General Manager for Windows Azure, notes in the press release.

Microsoft's involvement started a few months ago, through our work with Real Dolmen on a Windows Azure SDK for PHP developers. This SDK has been submitted to the Zend Framework, and it now forms the basis of Microsoft's contribution to the Simple Cloud API project.

As Vijay Rajagopalan, a Principal Architect at Microsoft, notes in his blog, the Zend Adapter for Windows Azure will leverage Microsoft's contribution. PHP developers will now be able to program against Windows Azure - in a way that is consistent with other cloud platforms - by tapping into the main features of Window Azure Storage.

Those PHP developers who need to use specific Windows Azure features not included in the scope of the Simple Cloup API (like transaction), will be able to combine the Zend Cloud Adapter with the dedicated Windows Azure SDK for PHP.

"This will allow developers to use common application services in the cloud, while enabling them to unlock value-added features available from individual providers. Simple API for Cloud also gives PHP developers more choices, and this is a great opportunity for them to think about using Windows Azure," he says.

The Microsoft Live Services Plug-in for Moodle Debuts

Peter Galli — Tue, 21 Jul 2009 11:15:00 GMT

Today, Microsoft announced the Live Services Plug-in for Moodle, a free download released under the General Public License v2 that integrates Microsoft's Live@edu services such as email, calendar, instant messaging and search directly into the Moodle experience.

What's even better is that this new, integrated experience is accessible via a single sign-on, which lets teachers and students access the resources and services they need to efficiently communicate, collaborate and learn.

Moodle is a free open source course management system that teachers use to create online learning websites for their classes, and has some 30 million users in 207 countries.

The plug-in and its feature set was designed as a result of extensive feedback from teachers and institutional IT leaders, and licensed in a way that is consistent with the practices of the open source community - freely under the GPL v2.

The news of the release of the Live Services Plug-in for Moodle under GPL v2 follows hot on the heels of Microsoft's release yesterday of 20,000 lines of device driver code to the Linux community under GPL v2.

This means that teachers and institutions can download the plug-in under a widely used open source license agreement and under the same terms that Moodle itself is licensed.

This approach underscores Microsoft's commitment to interoperability and open standards, as well as to collaboration so as to help customers, partners, educators and students across the world be successful in a heterogeneous technology world.

With the Live Services Plug-in, educators can email class notes and lecture slides to everyone in the class as well as send alerts regarding homework assignments or quizzes - all from within the same environment.

Students can also utilize Bing for search, check their calendar, send an email or just an instant message - without having to manage multiple accounts in multiple systems. They can do it all right within Moodle. They can also check unread emails using advanced features like keyboard shortcuts to check email quickly for example between class periods or just before lectures start.

The Microsoft Live Services Plug-in for Moodle will be part of a growing collection of solutions available from the Microsoft Education Labs.

For more on this news, you can read the blog from L. Michael Golden, Corporate Vice President of Microsoft's Education Products Group, as well as what Moodle founder Martin Dougiamas has to say about the plug-in.

ECMAScript Candidate Specification Published

Peter Galli — Fri, 10 Apr 2009 19:50:00 GMT

The candidate specification of the ECMAScript language standard - known as ECMA-262, was published on April 9.

ECMAScript is the scripting language used to create web pages with dynamic behavior, and is more commonly known as JavaScript. It is a component of every web browser and is an essential aspect of interoperability.

The ECMAScript standard is "one of the core standards that enable the existence of interoperable web applications on the World Wide Web," Ecma International, which develops standards for Information and Communication Technology, said in a media release.

This candidate specification, the PDF of which is available here, will now undergo interoperability and web compatibility testing, and will likely be submitted to the Ecma General Assembly for ratification as an Ecma standard before the end of 2009.

ECMA is inviting technical experts to review this candidate specification and submit feedback here by July 15, 2009.

This latest revision of ECMA-262 will now be known as ECMAScript, Fifth Edition and not under the previous working name ECMAScript 3.1.

The Fifth Edition codifies de facto interpretations of the language specification that have become common among browser implementations and adds support for new features, ECMA said.

The ECMAScript, Fifth Edition candidate specification has been developed by Ecma TC39, whose membership includes all major browser vendors.

These members will now create and test implementations of the candidate specification to verify its correctness and the feasibility of creating interoperable implementations and for web compatibility testing to ensure that the revised specification remains compatible with existing web applications.

TC39 members Opera, Mozilla, and Microsoft have each committed to participating in this testing process, which should be finished by the middle of July, and that a final draft of the specification can be agreed upon in September for submission to the Ecma General Assembly for final approval in December 2009.

ECMA also expects this to result in a fast-track submission to ISO/IEC JTC 1 for revision of ISO/IEC 16262.

"We expect the Fifth Edition to benefit all web developers by helping improve browser interoperability and making enhanced scripting features broadly available," said Allen Wirfs-Brock, Microsoft's ECMAScript architect. Read more about all this on Microsoft's JScript team blog.

The last major revision of the ECMAScript standard was the Third Edition, published in 1999 and work on future ECMAScript editions continues as part of the ECMAScript Harmony project.

Expanding the interoperability of eclipse4SL: Mac support comes to the Eclipse for Silverlight project

Vijay Rajagopalan — Wed, 18 Mar 2009 18:15:00 GMT

In October 2008, when Microsoft announced the general availability of Silverlight 2.0, and, as part of Microsoft’s ongoing commitment to interoperability, Microsoft and Soyatec unveiled the Eclipse Tools for Silverlight (Eclipse4SL).

Today, Microsoft and Soyatec are expanding our interoperability collaboration by releasing a Community Technology Preview (CTP) of the eclipse4SL project that includes support for the Macintosh platform. Mac and Windows developers can now collaborate on Silverlight projects using the Eclipse or Visual Studio IDEs. We have also added several new features to the project that should please all developers like C# code generation and improved XAML auto-completion (check out our Interoperability Team blog for more details and a demo)

As an open source initiative sponsored by Microsoft (funding and architectural guidance) and led by Soyatec (development), the eclipse4SL project is released under the Eclipse Public License Version 1.0 on SourceForge.net and was submitted by Soyatec it to the Eclipse Foundation as an open Eclipse project. Since its inception the project has received lots of feedback and made significant progress. eclipse4SL has been among the “Top Rated” projects on www.eclipseplugincentral.com for weeks:

(Screenshot taken on 03/16/2009)

For more information, visit the Eclipse for Silverlight web site, or join the discussion at http://www.eclipse4sl.org/community/.

Vijay Rajagopalan, Principal Architect in the Interoperability Strategy Team at Microsoft.

Better Tools for Web Development

Mark Stone — Wed, 18 Mar 2009 15:10:00 GMT

Several years ago I was helping a musician friend of mine set up a web site to use as a promotional site for his live performances. I opted for a simple, PHP-based Content Management System (CMS) that wouldn’t require any special knowledge for him to post new information, and would be – famous last words – easy for me to set up and maintain.

Not having done professional web development for some time, I quickly found myself on the phone to one of my PHP guru friends. After editing three configuration files (two for the web server, one for PHP itself), and adjusting to make sure we had the right version of PHP running with the right version of MySQL, we finally got everything working, and the CMS properly installed and configured.

This small example has several instructive lessons:

Getting software components working together properly is hard. The open source community takes real pride in tackling this challenge, having delivered tools like make, dpkg, and apt. Even so, simple cases can fail and mire you in complexity.
None of this is where web developers want to spend their time. The creative, innovative work is all done once you have the right components in place.
Absent perfect tools (which we’ll probably never have), you want to have the collective knowledge of your developer community working for you. Without my friend on the phone, I’d have had a much bigger problem on my hands.

So there’s something very liberating about seeing Microsoft offer better tools and facilitate better community collaboration so that web developers can spend more time on creative work and less on component complexity.

I’m referring specifically to the Microsoft Web Platform: Web Platform Installer 2.0 Beta (WebPI) and Windows Web Application Gallery, announced today at MIX ’09.

WebPI provides a single online destination and a single process for downloading and installing Microsoft’s freely available web products. By itself this may seem like no more than much-needed common sense, a good effort by Microsoft to help web developers get all the components they need working together more easily and more effectively.

What makes this development really interesting is the Web Application Gallery, an opportunity for web developers to participate and collaborate in a knowledge marketplace of shared components. In other words any web developer who follows certain basic guidelines can add their product to the Gallery, and be part of this ecosystem/community of shared web development activity. This is an opportunity not just to market your work, but share ideas and innovations with other web developers, and indeed let them build on your work.

Does that sound reminiscent of an open source community? It should. While there is no requirement that Gallery code be open source, the spirit behind this effort is very much one of collaboration. The Gallery is based on the idea that web developers collectively can advance their work more than each can individually.

Nor is this a playground strictly for Microsoft technologies. There are two supported web development frameworks in the Gallery: .NET and PHP. Opening up the world of PHP applications for Windows is an exciting prospect. There is at least the possibility that something like Word Press on Windows Server will be a point and click install. We aren’t there yet. WebPI installs SQL Server by default, and MySQL is still a manual install. Many web developers won’t – or shouldn’t – care about the difference, but to some it will matter.

But this is definitely a step along the right path, one step closer to making PHP an operating system-agnostic language. Because a PHP developer should care only about building great apps.

Web Sandbox Source Now Available Under Apache License 2.0

Peter Galli — Tue, 27 Jan 2009 02:48:00 GMT

Microsoft has released more source code under an OSI-approved license: this time it has made the source code for the Web Sandbox runtime available under the Apache 2.0 open source license.

The Web Sandbox project explores how to advance the web platform to improve security, isolation, quality of service and extensibility capabilities for web developers and website users.

More information on the licensing details, as well as comprehensive documentation for experimenting and integrating with the Web Sandbox, can be found here.

But, while developers are being encouraged to help define and refine the Web Sandbox, it is not recommended for those developers creating production sites as it is still under development.

The Web Sandbox was created in response to limitations found in the current web platform, and is designed to explore potential solutions. Having a more secure and robust architecture as a foundational building block will help drive the next wave of Web innovation.

The Sandbox is a framework that works on most modern browsers that support the"ECMA-262, 3^rd Edition" (JavaScript) standard, and provides the same features in all modern web browsers. No browser add-ons or changes are required to leverage this technology. Beyond security, the Web Sandbox normalizes the different browsers and provides consistent W3C DOM support.

Since the initial release of Web Sandbox at PDC 2008, the team has received a lot of useful feedback from the web security community, and has also been collaborating with a number of customers, partners and the standards communities, all of whom want to adopt the technology when it is ready.

The goal? An open and interoperable standard that will help foster interoperability with complementary technologies like script frameworks and drive widespread adoption of the Web Sandbox.

This move is good news for Microsoft and the open source communities. But, it is important to note that while an Apache license is being used, the Web Sandbox project is not an Apache Software Foundation project and is not sponsored or endorsed by the ASF.

Microsoft does, however, already have an active relationship with the ASF. In fact, last year the company announced it had become a sponsor of the ASF so as to help enable the Foundation pay administrators and other support staff so that its developers can focus on writing great software.

Sam Ramji, the senior Director of Platform Strategy at Microsoft, also delivered a keynote address at ApacheCon in New Orleans last November.

Microsoft's Interoperability Technical Strategy Team already participates as a code contributor to the Apache Stonehenge incubator project; the company has also contributed a patch to ADOdb, a popular data access layer for PHP used by many applications and which is licensed under the LGPL and BSD; while Microsoft's Powerset team contributes to HBase, an open-source, column-oriented, distributed database written in Java.

Update: Stonehenge Incubation Project

Peter Galli — Mon, 19 Jan 2009 20:00:00 GMT

As Microsoft continues the drive for interoperability between different implementations on various platforms, the Interoperability Technical Strategy Team is, for the first time, participating as a code contributor to an Apache project: the Stonehenge incubator project.

Microsoft first talked about Stonehenge at ApacheCon 2008, which was held in New Orleans last November. Since then, it has been approved as an incubator project within Apache Software Foundation, and WSO2 and Microsoft have already contributed code for a web-services based sample application, known as StockTrader, to this effort.

That code can be found here, along with the contributions from WSO2.

Stonehenge has attracted some very prominent committers so far, Kamajit Bath, a Principal Program Manager in the Interoperability Technical Strategy Team and the lead for Microsoft's participation in Stonehenge, says in a recent blog post.

"I hope that the momentum will be sustained, and I am looking forward to seeing code contributions from other folks and seeing the StockTrader sample application enhanced with new features. I also hope that new sample applications will be developed to cover other areas of the WS-* standards that are not best represented by the StockTrader application. I look forward to participating in this discussion with the Stonehenge community," he says.

There are three Microsoft committers on the Stonehenge incubator project: Greg Leake, who wrote the original StockTrader application; Drew Baird, who worked to get it ready for contribution to Stonehenge; and Mike Champion, who will play an active role in this effort.

In a recent blog post, Champion says Microsoft have heard from customers that they want sample applications based on real-world scenarios and challenges, as these will help them realize the potential of these technologies that have been developed and standardized for the last 8 years or so.

The initial response from the Apache community has also been quite favorable, and "I have a personal commitment to invest in helping make Stonehenge a success, and look forward to digging in," he says.

Champion also notes that Stonehenge is being championed by Paul Fremantle, co-founder and CTO of WSO2, "which has been a great partner in helping to improve and demonstrate the interoperability of the WS-* standards across platforms."

He cites, as an example of this, TechEd 2008, where Jonathan Marsh of WSO2 and Greg Leake of Microsoft demonstrated how separate WSO2 and Microsoft components implementing a mutlti-tier stock trading application can interoperate and be substituted for one another, he says in the blog.

StockTrader is also just the starting point for the broader goals of Stonehenge, which aims to develop a set of sample applications to demonstrate seamless interoperability across multiple underlying platform technologies by using currently defined W3C and OASIS standard protocols.

Stonehenge can also help wire up the ‘last mile' between the standardized web services infrastructure that is now implemented across key platforms, and a new generation of service oriented applications that will span them, he says.

Existing WS-* interoperability work such of the sort done by WS-I and in our "plugfests" will continue to solidify the platform-level interoperability. The new work, exemplified by Apache Stonehenge, should attract a wider community of users who can exploit the hard standardization and platform interoperability work without having to wallow in as many nasty details as in the past.

For Bath, projects like Stonehenge are important in enhancing interoperability between different software implementations. While standards organizations do a great job and the roll out of various WS-* standards is a testimonial to the fact that they can work efficiently, interoperability work doesn't stop at the end of the standardization process but, rather, that is where it really starts, he says.

MindTouch, Microsoft, and Social Enterprise Collaboration

Peter Galli — Wed, 17 Dec 2008 01:33:00 GMT

In this, our second video filmed at an open source company, the spotlight falls on MindTouch, whose Deki Wiki enables users to connect teams, enterprise systems, publishing systems, Web services and Web 2.0 applications.

The first video talked to developers at BitRock about their product as well as their thoughts on open source versus proprietary software, and can be viewed here.

The MindTouch Deki, which is built on top of the Mono, the open source .Net implementation, is downloaded some 2,000 times a day.

You'll see and hear Damien, a graphics designer, talk about his one-eyed fish and the disappearance of Phil, the filter feeder, and how he is only going to have community fish in his next tank, fish who like one another and work well together.

Aaron Fulkerson, the CEO and one of the company's founders, talks about his passion for getting the product running on Windows, with Windows Server 2008 and a Microsoft installer. For him, it really doesn't matter what technology the solution is implemented on, as long as the company has delivered a great product to the market that is "free, as in freedom, as in free speech."

While there is a groundswell of community adoption around MindTouch's Linux deployments, lots of large companies are also asking for deployments on Windows. In fact, its core market is those people who like both .Net and open source.

Take a look for yourself, and see what they have to say.

Live ID to support OpenID

Peter Galli — Mon, 27 Oct 2008 21:58:00 GMT

More good news coming out of PDC today! Windows Live ID is publicly committing to support the OpenID digital identity framework with the announcement of the public availability of a Community Technology Preview of the Windows Live ID OpenID Provider.

This means that Windows Live ID accounts will be able to be used to sign in to any OpenID Web site. The Windows Live ID OpenID Provider (OP) enables anyone with a Windows Live ID account to set up an OpenID alias and to use that alias for identification at an increasing number of OpenID 2.0 relying party sites-for example: Plaxo, Pibb, StackOverflow.com and Wikispaces.

Also, in his blog earler today about the Azure Services Platform, Sam Ramji talked about how, as part of Microsoft's commitment to openness and working with open source communities, he asked the Open Source Technology Center (led by Tom Hanrahan) to come up with some specific examples that show how open source communities can access Windows Azure.

This work has resulted in several ‘proofs of concept' which show open source developers that they can create applications that run as services and have access to services in the cloud. These ‘proofs of concept' demonstrate that:

A blog engine hosted on Windows Azure can authenticate users with OpenID.
A developer using the Eclipse IDE can write a C# application that runs on Windows Azure
Gallery, the leading PHP photo application, can access Windows Azure cloud storage

Hank Janssen & John Bocharov: Introduction to SQL Server Driver for PHP (SQLPHP)

jcannon — Thu, 08 Nov 2007 18:14:00 GMT

Our own Hank Janssen gives the Channel9 team an update on the work that has been done to provide a native driver to SQL Server for PHP.

"SQL Team Says:
"The SQL Server Driver for PHP (October 2007) Community Technology Preview (CTP) is designed to enable reliable, scalable integration with SQL Server for PHP applications deployed on the Windows platform. The Driver for PHP is a PHP 5 extension that allows the reading and writing of SQL Server data from within PHP scripts. It provides a procedural interface for accessing data in all Editions of SQL Server 2005 and SQL Server 2000 (including Express Edition), and makes use of PHP features, including PHP streams to read and write large objects."

Wow. This is cool. Need to find out more about this. What exactly is this thing? Why did we create it? What are the platform requirments? Is it open source? Who are the folks behind this? You know the C9 drill. Tune in and meet SQLPHP Program Manager John Bocharov and Microsoft Open Source champion Hank Janssen who answer a bunch of questions and provide good context about the thinking behind SQLPHP, history and future. Check it out.

PHP on IIS

jcannon — Mon, 24 Sep 2007 20:01:00 GMT

Just about one year ago, Bill Hilf announced Zend and Microsoft's partnership to enhance PHP performance on Windows Server's IIS web server. This technical collaboration has focused on enhancing the reliability and performance of PHP on Windows Server 2003, and Windows Server 2008. As part of this collaboration, the IIS product group has been working on a new component for IIS6 and IIS7 called FastCGI Extension which will enable IIS to much more effectively host PHP applications.

Today, we're excited to announce the release of the Go Live version of Microsoft FastCGI Extension for IIS 5.1/6.0 (FastCGI Extension) as a free download. There's a ton more information on various community sites, so let's get right to it:

Download the FastCGI Extension (You'll need a running install of Windows Server. If you don't already, you can grab Windows Server 2003 R2 here.)
Detailed release information on IIS.NET and configuration documentation.
Join the PHP community discussion on IIS.NET

Would like to hear feedback from our community on this release and will ensure it is routed back to the OSSL and the IIS product team.

- Jamie