Port 25: The Open Source Community at Microsoft : PHP, Java

Announcing the PHP SDK for Windows Azure

Peter Galli — Wed, 13 May 2009 00:29:00 GMT

Vijay Rajagopalan, a Principal Architect here at Microsoft, is at TechEd India, where he will demo later this week a new set of interoperability projects related to PHP.

These projects include the PHP SDK for Windows Azure, an open source effort for which Microsoft has provided funding, with development by RealDolmen, whose goal is to provide high-level abstractions that enable PHP developers to interoperate readily with Windows Azure.

The PHP SDK for Windows Azure focuses on REST 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.

These projects, for which Microsoft has provided funding and which are available on Codeplex under a BSD license, are yet another proofpoint of the company's commitment to interoperability, and developers will be happy to know that the first batch of these have already been developed by Accenture.

Read Rajagopalan's full blog here for all the details.

The Azure Services Platform has been designed to be open, standards-based and interoperable, and its support for XML, REST and SOAP standards means that any of the Azure services can be called from other platforms and programming languages.

Microsoft has provided funding for two other SDKs that support third party programming languages: Java SDK for Microsoft .NET Services and Ruby SDK for Microsoft .NET Services so as to facilitate interoperability between the Azure Services Platform and non-Microsoft languages and technologies.

The inclusion of FastCGI in Windows Azure's hosting environment was announced at MIX 2009, and the protocol enables developers to run web applications on Windows Azure that were written using third party programming languages, including PHP. This opens up new options for PHP developers to deploy their applications.

A Technology Preview of the PHP SDK for Windows Azure will be 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 toolkit, and join the user forum.

So, stay tuned, as there's a whole lot more to come!

Apache Stonehenge: Interoperability at Work

Peter Galli — Tue, 12 May 2009 17:24:00 GMT

The Stonehenge incubator project is approaching its first milestone: deploying the first set of samples and making them work together.

This is a really exciting development and continues to deliver on the project's primary goal: to provide practical applications that span languages and platforms and demonstrate how to achieve interoperability.

Multiple implementations of the Stonehenge Stocktrader sample application, including .NET, Java, PHP, Python and Ruby, have been committed to the repository. You can check the code here.

From a simplified architecture point of view, the Stonehenge Stocktrader application is built as follows:

A User Interface layer delivering the web front end (HTML)

A middle tier layer including a Business Services layer (login, account processing) and an Order Processing layer (buy/sell transactions)

A Data Access layer to provide access to the database for the middle tier layer (Business Services and Order Processing)

And, finally, the database where the application data lives

The work thus far has focused on the .NET, PHP, and Java interoperability scenarios, and the three Stocktrader implementations have been deployed in multiple configurations.

A series of tests were then run, mixing and matching the layers from the three implementations, playing with the configurations and leveraging the Web Services standards, including WS-Security, to provide message integrity and security.

A detailed "interoperability walkthrough" explaining all the different configurations has been posted here, while the full blog post by Kamaljit Bath, a Principal Program Manager in the Interoperability Technical Strategy Team at Microsoft, can be found here.

"Microsoft is pleased with its participation and the progress so far, and this new outcome from the Stonehenge project is very encouraging. With the implementation of the WS-* Standards, we get the benefit of distributed applications and platforms. We recognized that it is not always easy to achieve these goals, but I really feel this type of practical guidance will be helpful for these types of scenarios," said Bath.

The team is also actively soliciting comments and feedback, and encouraging both developers and users to participate in the project to ensure that the project continues to move in a direction that meets real people's needs.

Opening Day: Azure Platform Debuts

Sam Ramji — Mon, 27 Oct 2008 14:00:00 GMT

Today at PDC in Los Angeles, Ray Ozzie unveiled the Azure Services Platform, which will enable developers to build the next generation of applications - spanning all the way from the cloud to the enterprise data center. My team's focus has been on making sure that this platform treats open source development technologies as first-class citizens.

A key components of the Azure Services Platform is Windows Azure, an infrastructure that provides core capabilities such as virtualized computation, scalable storage, and automated service management. Developers will be able to build or extend parts or complete service-based applications using Live Services, .Net Services and SQL Services.

They will also be able to choose from a range of open source development tools and technologies, and be able to access Azure services using a variety of common internet standards, including HTTP, REST, WS* and Atom.

The Azure platform's goal is to support all developers and their choice of IDE, language and technology. We are also providing programmable components that can be consumed by other applications, and Microsoft is funding and sponsoring open source software development kits to enable Java and Ruby developers to take advantage of Azure.

This is significant as this is the first time we are delivering cross-platform software development kits at the same time as Microsoft Developer Network software development kits.

We are also funding these open source projects, under the BSD licensing model, in collaboration with Thoughtworks Inc. and Schakra Inc., and they will be run on open source portals RubyForge and SourceForge.

Much of this interoperability work was undertaken by Jean Paoli, the General Manager for Interoperability Strategy, and his team, including Vijay Rajagopalan, the Principal Architect for Interoperability Strategy, so a big thanks is due to them on this front.

In addition, as part of Microsoft's commitment to openness and working with open source communities, I 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 allowed us to deliver 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 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
A blog engine hosted on Windows Azure can authenticate users with OpenID.

Specific to Gallery, we've done two simple things: we created wrappers to convert the Windows Azure API to PHP objects, and we created a Windows Azure subclass inherited from the Windows NT Platform class. The net of all this is that, with a small amount of code, we were able to connect one of the top PHP application to Windows Azure, specifically, photo images stored as BLOBs in the cloud.

Finally, Microsoft is also going to publish the "M" language specification, including MSchema, MGrammar and MGraph, under the Open Specification Promise. This will facilitate the interoperability of the "Oslo" declarative modeling language, codenamed "M," with prominent industry standards such as WS* specifications, XML formats, industry protocols and security standards.

Stay tuned, because there's more to come.

Cheers,

Sam