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

Windows Cache Extension 1.0 for PHP Released

Peter Galli — Fri, 20 Nov 2009 00:40:00 GMT

The Microsoft Internet Information Services (IIS) team announced today the release of Windows Cache Extension 1.0 for PHP, a PHP accelerator that is used to increase the speed of PHP applications running on Windows and Windows Server. This is a production-ready release that is provided under an open source BSD license, with the source code hosted and maintained here, and the documentation hosted on php.net.

You can find more details on this release on IIS team Product Unit Manager Mai-lan Tomsen Bukovec's blog.

WinCache extension is a significant open source contribution from Microsoft to the PHP on Windows community. The extension code is hosted and maintained on PHP Extensions Community Library (PECL) and is available for everyone to view, branch, compile, and contribute to.

The IIS team also invites the PHP development community to join it in development of this caching extension for PHP on Windows. There have already been some contributions from the community whileWinCache was in the pre-release mode, and IIS team is looking forward to having others join this new PHP on Windows caching project.

Also, in time for this release, an independent PHP company - Ibuildings - has conducted a benchmark test with the WinCache RTW bits and published the results.

The release of this production-ready PHP accelerator for Windows is an important step towards making the Windows operating system an even better platform for hosting PHP applications.

WinCache extension significantly improves performance of PHP applications and lowers CPU load on the server. This, together with the fact that no application code changes are necessary to take advantage of the caching, makes WinCache a must have extension when running PHP on Windows.

More information about the WinCache extension for PHP can be found as follows:

The PECL documentation on WinCache
The PHP on Windows feature team blogs (Kanwal, Ruslan, and Don)
The WinCache community forum
The IIS.NET documentation on WinCache
The WinCache on PECL source code, licensed under BSD
How to file bugs on WinCache in PECL

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.

More on the Hyper-V Linux Integration Components

hjanssen — Mon, 20 Jul 2009 20:24:00 GMT

Well, there is no easy way to say this, so I am simply going to start this blog with the following line.

Microsoft just submitted source code for the Hyper-V Linux Integration Components to the Linux Kernel Community Under GPL v2.

Well, there's a conversation starter! Are you still all sitting in your chairs???

Let me summarize:

Yes, our device driver code was released directly to the Linux Kernel
We released the code under GPL v2
We are working with Greg Kroah-Hartman so it is ready for the next release of the Linux Kernel, version 2.6.32
We will continue to update the driver code to enhance interoperability on an ongoing basis, but it's our hope that other developers in the community will find the code useful and worthy of collaboration.

Fallen off your chair yet?

Microsoft developed the Linux device drivers to enhance the performance of Linux when virtualized on Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V. My team and I were responsible for testing and validating the driver components that were contributed for this first release.

Now, my team and I will be responsible for further developing this code going forward. (Yes, that does mean that I have gone back to leverage my very early roots as a Kernel programmer. Let the world be warned!!!!). Haiyang Zhang has been working on this code with me, and he will continue to work with me on this going forward.

When I joined Microsoft three years ago, the primary reason was to put my money where my mouth was. You see complaining about something is easy, but it becomes a little more complicated when somebody offers you the opportunity to be part of helping change what you have complained about.

So, three years after taking the job that made me put my money where my mouth was (and still often is!), I for one am EXTREMELY happy to see one of the most significant fruits of our work here in the Microsoft Open Source Technology Center (OSTC). But I have to say, even I would have been hard-pressed to think three years ago that we would consider contributing to the Linux Kernel.

As you know, two years ago Microsoft announced a partnership with Novell, and Tom Hanrahan ran the lab on a day to day basis till about 9 months ago. Since then I have had the pleasure of running the technical side of the execution of that lab under Tom Hanrahan for the OSTC. One of the primary tasks for that lab is to make sure Windows runs well on top of XEN and Linux runs well on top of Hyper-V, and we do this in very close cooperation with Novell.

We do most of this work as an extension to Mike Neil's Hyper-V team.

As part of this, we were asked to help develop and maintain a crucial part of this work called the Linux Integration Components. This code is designed so that Linux can run in an "enlightened mode" on top of Hyper-V (enlightened mode is roughly the Hyper-V equivalent of "paravirtualized mode" for the Xen hypervisor). Without this driver code, Linux can run on top of Windows, but without the same high performance levels. It is this device driver code that we are releasing today, directly to the Linux Kernel.

We're not talking a few hundred lines of code here; we're talking about roughly 20,000 lines of code.

Is this a Dump and Run from Microsoft? Absolutely not! We plan to enhance the functionality of this code, and we will continue to work with the Linux Community to support the drivers and to ensure continued interoperability.

As you can imagine, this was the result of a lot of hard work: Hiyang Zhang, who has been co-writing this code; Hashir Abdi, who has been testing all this stuff; as well as Vijay Tewari and Mike Sterling from the Hyper-V team who have been taking care of the Hyper-V side.

And last, but certainly not least, Greg Kroah-Hartman, who has been helping me to make all this code land in the right area in the kernel. He has patiently worked to help me correct my obvious mistakes and to get the code contributed into the kernel.

So where are we today? Well, Greg Kroah-Hartman will make the code visible to the outside world today. (For those who want to get a head start, the code will sit under <your kernel tree>/drivers/staging/hv). After it becomes visible, I will write a few more blogs this week that should help you to understand, build and run them.

The titles I am thinking for these blogs are:

Where do the Linux ICs reside in the kernel tree and how do I build them?

And

How do I install, configure and run the Linux IC's?

I had almost forgotten how wrapped up you can be once you start writing code again. So I have not gotten much sleep this past week, but it has been a joy to get back into coding again!

Crafting a Better PHP Build Process on Windows – Part IV

Garrett Serack — Wed, 24 Jun 2009 00:12:00 GMT

In the previous post, I discussed what it took to use PGO on the Windows PHP build. That led to me building automated build scripts...

Automation as the root of all evil

"Anything that can be done for you, automatically, can be done to you, automatically." - David C. Wyland

First, I had to get the entire dependency stack into the mix. While some of the dependent libraries had VCProject files, some didn't. Worse, even if they had them, you couldn't tell with a degree of certainty that they were compiled with the same settings which would enable them to take advantage of PGO optimization.

I began taking each project, updating (or creating, using the Trace and mkProject tools) the Visual C++ project files that would use the same settings as the rest, and eventually came up with a solution file that had 74 projects in it - some of the projects generated more than one binary.

Next, I had to actually automate the process of creating the vcproject files. Once you've got the right dependencies, the PHP build process cranks out over 30 binaries when you include the PHP extensions that get built as part of the core.

After what seemed like a million compile-verify-tweak iterations, I had the tools that could generate VCProject files for the core PHP and all the extensions, provided it was all in the right place.

Next I wrote a .cmd batch script that went step-by-step, checking out the source, compiling the dependent libraries, building the PHP makefile, compiling PHP like the community did - and logging what it was doing, then switching to instrumentation, rebuilding the dependencies again, building the stack, PGO training it with test data and some applications (Wordpress, MediaWiki and phpBB) and then relinking it with optimization.

I got the .cmd script almost working, but it was fairly fragile. At that point I decided to switch batch scripting strategies and, in about a week, rewrote the batch script in JScript, which was far more flexible, and a lot more reliable.

What's next...

"The future always arrives too fast... and in the wrong order." - Alvin Toffler

During this process, I tweaked the build process that is generated quite a bit, adding in a few more applications to the PGO training, which cranks the performance up more and more.

Now, I can add in more scripts to assist with the training pretty trivially, but it still takes some effort to package up an entire application like MediaWiki or Wordpress and include it into the build process.

Even once I've added in an application, I end up doing a whole slew of comparative testing to see what impact it has on the final executables.

As time goes by, I'm sure there will be more tweaking to be done but, in all likelihood, any significant performance gains are going to be the result some modification of the PHP codebase itself.

Crafting a Better PHP Build Process on Windows – Part I

Garrett Serack — Tue, 09 Jun 2009 18:22:00 GMT

The last several months, I've been working very deeply with PHP - specifically, compiling the PHP core itself, and looking for avenues for optimization. This is the first of four posts about the journey I've been on with PHP.

I get started building PHP

"It is a bad plan that admits of no modification" - Publilius Syrus

I started working with building PHP itself about a year ago. Initially, I was trying to put together an environment to compile up the PHP stack so that I could do some debugging, and track down a few faults that we were encountering in some of the PHP applications that we were trying to modify to use the SQL Server PHP driver that the SQL Server team here at Microsoft was creating.

Once I began to work with the source code, I found out very quickly that on top of having a hard time recreating the exact same binaries that the community build process generated, there were a large number of dependent libraries that were available in binary-only form and which were kept in a zip file that was passed around from developer to developer. That seemed a little odd for an open-source project, but I can certainly understand that over time, unless someone is working hard to keep it all together, these things happen.

Around the same time, the community had started to invest time and effort to 'clean up' the dependencies for building PHP on Windows, and move towards supporting VC9 (Visual Studio 2008) as an officially supported compiler.

In order to help in this process, I built out some testing environments in our Lab, which would let me compile up PHP on Windows and Linux, in order to get decent and reliable test results which we could use to identify any shortcomings that we could then address. This includes benchmarking not just the core PHP executable, but replicable and comparable testing of PHP applications such as Wordpress, MediaWiki, Gallery and phpBB.

PHP 5.3 on Windows: Not your father's PHP

"I'm looking for a lot of men who have an infinite capacity to not know what can't be done." - Henry Ford

For PHP 5.3, Pierre (and others) had gone out and found up-to-date versions of all the dependencies, brought them together, and managed to get them compiling with VC6 and VC9. They had posted these in binary and source form to the PHP Windows Internals site, which allows anyone to rebuild the PHP stack on Windows and, theoretically, get the same results as the 'official' build.

Jumping in at that point was much easier than it had been, as all you had to do was download the binaries of the libraries, check out the source code, run a few commands at the command line and, presto, you had your PHP executables.

At this point Pierre and I played around with the build flags on VC9 and found some settings that gave some pretty significant improvements to the speed of PHP vs. the speed of the VC6 version -and a lot of speed improvements vs. the old 5.2x line of PHP.

In Part II, I'll talk about going one step further with optimization.

PHP|Tek in Chicago

hjanssen — Thu, 28 May 2009 00:29:00 GMT

Last week I got the perfect excuse to get out of the Planning and Budget process that we are going through right now, attending PHP|Tek, which was a welcome escape as planning and budgeting in any company is usually enough fun to make a grown man cry!

So last week I went to PHP|Tek in Chicago to speak and meet folk from the PHP community. As always, I greatly enjoy meeting the people who write and use PHP, and I have been to and spoken with enough of the speakers at past events that I know a lot of the core people by first name.

Kind of funny that we now have gotten to the point inside of Microsoft that we are almost old hats at Open Source conferences

There were two days prior to the conference where a group of core PHP developers and community people talked about the state - past, present and future - of PHP. It was super cool to be invited to that one!

Unfortunately I was only able to join one of those two days: amazing that flying from Seattle to Chicago takes the better part of a day!

The discussions there where very wide ranging, from whether there will be a PHP 5.4, what 6.0 will bring, which bugs are current show stoppers, where PDO is going, etc. etc.

For me PHP|Tek remains a very nice ‘community' conference, where the focus is on the community of PHP and not the business/vendors of PHP.

These kinds of conferences are the best way to network, and it would take too long to talk about all the people I spoke to. But Elizabeth Smith and I talked about us writing documentation for php.net (I have been wanting to write the ‘how to build PHP for Windows' part) so hopefully look for more documentation written by Microsoft for php.net soon.

As always I talked to a lot of the usual suspects: Scott MacVicar, Andrei Zmievski, Derick Rethans, Sebastian Bergmann, Chris Shiflett, Cal Evans and others.

Oh, and if you are really bored, check out the latest May issue of php architect, which has a bunch of really cool articles about PHP and Windows. Some of them were even co-written by me, which gives you an idea how far php | architect has sunk to have people write articles for them

I just checked out the Website, and the May issue is not posted yet. But everybody who attended PHP|Tek got a copy of that issue in their goodies bag.

I always enjoy giving sessions and the session I did give at PHP|Tek was ‘PHP 5.3 The best PHP on Windows Yet' , and I got some really good feedback. I think I had about 40+ people in my session. People are always surprised to see Microsoft's involvement with PHP and what we have done with the community so far.

It is a talk I have given before. It starts with describing what the organization I belong to (the Microsoft Open Source Technology Center) does and how we work inside of Microsoft. After that I go into some detail about why PHP 5.3 is the best PHP on Windows.

Did you know that, for example, with PHP releases prior to 5.3, the code was build with libraries that were more than 10 years old and for which nobody really had any idea where the source code went? So it was built - linked rather - with object files that were more than 10 years old.

It makes it really hard to fix/improve stuff that you do not have the source code for

Well, pretty much all the issues of the past are now gone. I will make sure I write a blog about what truly went into PHP 5.3 for Windows soon, if the budgeting and planning process doesn't kill me before that point. In the meantime, here is a link to phpfreaks where, a few weeks ago, I posted a bunch of what we have been doing.

One really interesting thing is that there were a lot of Microsoft people at this conference, specifically from the DPE (Developer Platform Evangelism) side of Microsoft.

These are the people who are very much field and customer focused. From my conversations with them, they enjoyed the conference and were glad to get the opportunity to speak with a lot of the OS crowd. It is amazing how much we all have in common once we talk about technology.

Thanks to the people who put on the conference: of course Marco Tabini, the man behind PHP|Tek, but especially Elizabeth Naramore, who is the unsung hero that is the real driver behind keeping PHP|Tek running smoothly!

Integrate Your IT Environment

Peter Galli — Thu, 02 Apr 2009 21:41:00 GMT

Microsoft is embarking on a 15-city road show to help customers learn more about available solutions that may address their unique interoperability needs.

This is just another of the many ways Microsoft continues to respond to customers working in heterogeneous environments, a mission that was enhanced by the announcement of our Interoperability Principles last year.

The road show is being organized by Microsoft TechNet, and will stop in cities from Mountain View on the West coast to Denver, Atlanta and Chicago as well as Philadelphia, Boston and New York on the East Coast.

The rationale behind these events is simple: many customers work in heterogeneous environments that include Microsoft technologies as well as those from MySQL, Apple and Linux. As such, integration becomes vital in order for their core business applications to maintain business flow and efficiency.

Each event will last four hours, during which three sessions will be offered: Windows Server 2008 Active Directory Interop with Linux and OS X; running Open Source Software on Window Server 2008; and SQL Server 2008 and PHP Web Application Infrastructure.

This program aims to increase understanding of the heterogeneous IT landscape and discuss practical interoperability solutions.

It also complements Microsoft's existing engagement in interoperability at many levels - through its ongoing participation in industry and internal development projects and standards bodies, as well as its publication of technologies under open licenses and strong collaboration with customers, governments and partners.

We hope you'll join us at one of these events!

The Hidden Technology Decision-Maker

Mark Stone — Wed, 25 Mar 2009 15:00:00 GMT

On Monday Microsoft and SD Forum held the 3rd annual Open Source ISV Forum. In a day of interesting talks, I was particularly struck by Larry Augustin's talk. As an emphasizing example of the growth of open source projects partnered with a commercial endeavor, Larry mentioned DotNetNuke.

DotNetNuke is, of course, freely available for download and licensed under an open source license. But there is also a professional edition and a range of complimentary commercial services for those who want service, support, or customizations. The business model is classic open source: the free download seeds the market with potential customers, and as some of those run up against the limits of what they are willing to do on their own, they make inquiries about the professional edition. Thus open source creates an inbound channel of qualified sales leads, without the overhead and expense of a sales force working in the field.

This is a great business model, but it's important to think about the actual decision-makers in this adoption process. What's distinctive about DotNetNuke is that it's one of the few mature, open source Content Management Systems (CMSs) that is not written in PHP. It is, as the name implies, ASP.NET based. And this reminds me of a prdocut management position I was in some years ago when (a) the only mature CMS choices were PHP-based, and (b) PHP on Windows was not yet a viable alternative.

The company in question was in a typical position: they were not a technology company, but needed a strong web presence for their business and to connect to the online community of their customers. They had a home-grown CMS solution that wasn't scaling, wasn't secure, and wasn't stable. My product management team put together a good comparison chart of various CMS choices, many of them open source. I sat down with the web development manager to review the choices.

"Some of these are good systems," he said, "but I have a team of .NET developers, and these are all PHP-based. I don't have head count to go out and hire a PHP dev for this project."

Note the decision-making process at work here:

From an agreed list of candidate software, an engineering team will download something to "test drive";
One developer will do some testing and make a recommendation;
From a short list of recommended software a more thorough test will be done with a prototype or pilot project;
Finally a choice will be made, and money will be spent.

The person with the first vote in the process is not a CIO or any other traditional "IT Decision Maker". It's one dev, talking to his manager. If your software gets vetoed at that level, or -- worse -- never even gets a try-out, then your product isn't in the decision-making process.

A lot has changed in recent years. PHP is now much better supported on Windows, and .NET projects like DotNetNuke are available and much more mature. This is as it should be. For open source to spread to its full potential, it has to be available in the technology adoption decision-making process. And that availability starts with being available to the hidden technology decision-maker: that lone developer who will look at software written in a framework they understand for a platform they work with.

Japanese LAMP Engineers Visit Redmond

Peter Galli — Tue, 10 Mar 2009 21:30:00 GMT

I was fortunate enough to spend last Thursday with a group of LAMP engineers who have some experience with Windows Server and IIS, and who are based in Japan.

The three - Kimio Tanaka, the president of Museum IN Cloud; Junpei Hosoda, the president of Yokohama System Development; and Hajime Taira, with Hewlett-Packard Japan - won a competition organized by impress IT and designed to get competitive LAMP engineers to increase the volume of technical information around PHP/IIS and application compatibility. The competition was titled "Install Maniax 2008".

A total of 100 engineers were chosen to compete and seeded with Dell server hardware and the Windows Web Server 2008 operating system. They were then required to deploy Windows Server/IIS and make the Web Server accessible from the Internet. They also had to run popular PHP/Perl applications on IIS and publish technical documentation on how to configure those applications to run on IIS.

The three winners were chosen based on the number of ported applications on IIS, with the prize being a trip to Redmond. A total of 71 applications out of the targeted 75 were ported onto IIS, of which 47 were newly ported to IIS, and related new "how to" documents were published to the Internet. Some 24 applications were also ported onto IIS based on existing "how to" documents.

The first-place winner Kimio Tanaka managed to port 71 applications onto a single IIS server. His technical documents can be found here.

Kentaro Yoshikawa, the Platform Strategy CSI Lead for Microsoft Japan, put the competition together and brought the winners to Redmond, where we arranged for them to meet with folk from the Windows Azure, Windows Server and IIS development teams. They also spent time with Sam Ramji, the Senior Director for Platform Strategy, as well as with Tom Hanrahan and Hank Janssen of the Open Source Technology Center.

Kentaro told me that the three were really impressed by the depth of the discussions they had during the day, which was useful to them as they have, until now, mostly lived outside of the traditional Microsoft ecosystem.

They also appreciated the depth of technical thought, strategy and commitment to open source communities that exists within not only the Platform Strategy group, but across Microsoft.

Update: PHP 5.3 on Windows

hanrahat — Fri, 16 Jan 2009 20:53:00 GMT

Congratulations to the PHP community on its PHP 5.3 alpha 2 release in December. In roughly one month, there have been over 80,000 downloads of the alpha 2 release from unique IP addresses.

You can see that interest in PHP on Windows is growing significantly when you compare this to the 40,000 or so Windows downloads of PHP 5.2 alpha and beta combined over nearly five months.

One of the critical accomplishments in 5.3 has been updating the code base so that the core engine can be built under the latest version of Visual C (VC9). This update has enabled members of the community to focus on optimizing the PHP core to run on Windows. Already, with alpha 2, the release is proving itself to be a stable, robust implementation.

The community anticipates hitting general availability for 5.3 in the spring. Interest in that release is already running high and should continue to grow in the coming weeks.

What's Microsoft up to with PHP?

Peter Galli — Wed, 07 Jan 2009 00:18:00 GMT

Over the past year, Microsoft has stepped up its participation in initiatives supporting Free and Open Source Software projects like Apache, Samba, and PHP. The company has also been working more closely with the PHP community, sponsoring PHP events and contributing code in the form of a patch to the ADODB PHP package, which is licensed under the LGPL, to make it work better with Microsoft SQL server.

Manuel Lemos, the developer of the PHPClasses.org Web site, takes a look at all of this in an extensive recent blog post titled “What is Microsoft up to with PHP,” and which includes an interview with Tom Hanrahan, the director of Microsoft’s Open Source Technology Center.

It makes for interesting reading!

On the Road in Europe - Take 2

hjanssen — Wed, 29 Oct 2008 17:38:00 GMT

Wednesday - Day two for my IPC in Mainz conference, which is a developer orientated PHP conference.

Very well attended. The most negative thing I can say about this conference is that for some unknown (but brilliant beyond my level of comprehension) reason the venue is a 30 minute cab drive from the Speaker hotel. And the shuttle provided in the morning leaves every 30 minutes, has 5 seats and has a line of 20+ people for it in the morning.

And yes, there are hotels closer by.

It is pretty cool to see how things changed in the last few years; people do not stop/point and stare anymore when they see Microsoft people walking around and actively engaging. People are happy to see us.

There are a lot sessions on a variety of topics, but I get the most out of talking to people outside of these sessions. I am starting to lose track with everybody I have talked to.

Anyhoot, I had a good conversation with Brian Akers. For those who do not know Brian, he is one of the people behind Drizzle. He gave a keynote yesterday that was extremely well attended and talked about the state of Drizzle, which is starting to become a really interesting Database.

One session that was pretty unique was Pierre Joye and Garrett Serack doing a joint session on how to build PHP on Windows. This used to require the sacrifice of your favorite item, standing on your head, facing the North and chanting to RA to get it to build.

The work we have done with the PHP community to make PHP on Windows the best possible platform in the past few months has been greatly improved and accelerated. All old libraries have been updated to their latest versions, something that had not been done in over 10 years for some of them. More importantly, these libraries are now the same versions (and thus have the same behavior) as their Linux counterpart.

Additionally the build system used was VC6, which means Visual Studio 1998!!. The build system is now VC9 or Visual studio 2008. And, depending on the speed of your machine, it builds in a few minutes. And viola, a brand new, shiny, hot from the oven, newly minted PHP.

Now we have a great place to start from, a build for Windows that we have all the code for, a build with a compiler that comes out of this century. That will leave us ready to do the next steps, optimizing PHP on Windows. And that is what we will be working on for the foreseeable future. If you can/want to please participate.

These changes are incorporated into the latest build starting with PHP 5.3. You can download this here.

If you want to check out in person what we did, and how you now can build PHP for Windows, check out this link.

BTW, Pierre and Garrett both have the misfortune to report to me at the OSTC. And yes, there are questions about their sanity

A few more days, and then back home. Where my wife, kid and dog claim they are looking forward to having me back again after 2 weeks. Off to get some rest.......

On the Road in Europe - Take 1

hjanssen — Tue, 28 Oct 2008 16:25:00 GMT

Today is Tuesday - That must mean I am in Mainz. I am on day 12 of my European trip. I was in Rome and Amsterdam last week.

In Rome I attended the Moodle conference, which was pretty cool. It was put on by Roma Tre and was one of many destinations in which Moodle held conferences this past month. I went to talk to Martin Dougiamas, Helen Foster and Petr Skoda as part of our ongoing quest to get PHP on Windows to be the best experience possible.

The deployment numbers that Martin showed in his presentation are quite impressive! I have been digging around for his presentation to give these numbers, but I can't find them. I am sure that Martin must have posted his presentation somewhere, I just have not found it yet.

But the intention was to start a working relationship with the Moodle community, and this was a great start. One of the most interesting presentations was from the Italian Airforce, who described their experiences in finding better educational tools to train their personnel, and settled on Moodle to be a large part of that. It is always interesting to have a General in the audience.

It is really amazing to see how and where Moodle is used. It is a testament to the intention of Moodle and Martin and the Moodle community that is has become so popular.

The other thing I did was meet with a lot of open source influential's/Government/CTO/Journalists etc. Microsoft Rome asked me to give a bunch of presentations and interviews, which I love to do, but it turned into a 17 hour-long gauntlet. And I just want to go on record and say that I cannot be held accountable for what I talked about the last 4 or so hours of that day. It became a little blurry at that point.

The bad thing about these trips is that I am away from home for a long period of time. The really good thing about doing these trips is that I get to meet so many people. It is really cool to see the faces and have the dialogues when I talk about what Microsoft is doing in the OS world. By far it is very positive.

But I get the biggest bang for the buck when we have discussions on what people do, and want, from the OS and from Microsoft. We have been doing more and more in the OS world, but unless we work closely with the community we have no idea if we are on the right track.

One of the questions I asked in Rome in a meeting with government officials and OS influential's was ‘what does open source mean to you?' There were many responses, and most of them followed the same line. Some of the common responses where: sharing knowledge, collaboration, personal recognition, information that is easy to get to, allocation of rights, intend to make communications possible.

Well, for the next few days I will be at the IPC in Mainz. So I will blog more tomorrow. There are a lot of things we are doing right now, so I have a lot of content

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

Why I’m excited about Yahoo!

Sam Ramji — Mon, 25 Feb 2008 18:31:00 GMT

There are no guarantees that a future of Microsoft + Yahoo! will arrive, but the possibilities have me feeling positive. These are just my personal opinions – and who knows what will happen – but a few things described below give me optimism for an increasingly high-performance, multi-platform, PHP-infused and developer-driven future.

Here are a few reasons why I’m excited.

Yahoo! is famous for its culture of openness. Outstanding technologies like Hadoop have been developed and contributed to the community, and the fundamental concepts of open Internet culture at Yahoo! are core to its success. Microsoft has made strides in the last few years in understanding and embracing open source developers, development models, and technologies – I’d say we’ve gone from 1 to 100 and are still going. Yahoo! would speed our progress from 100 to 1,000.

One important reason? Technical leaders like Rasmus Lerdorf, Doug Cutting, and many others….

Those who read Port25 often know that we are at the heart of the shift at Microsoft to embrace PHP on Windows. My team has had the privilege to work with Andi Gutmans and Zeev Suraski and their engineering team. Just through this collaboration with community developers and our partners at Zend, Microsoft engineers and product teams learned a lot.

We have also learned a great deal from Jim Hugunin (Jython and Iron Python architect) and come a long way in our openness to new languages and community development. John Lam has shown us the light on Ruby. I think we are at a point in time where we could thrill developers with Rasmus’ leadership on PHP. Having the inventor of PHP in the same company with the language runtime performance wizards in the Developer Division under Scott Guthrie, makes my mind boggle.

Similarly, a major focus at Microsoft is understanding the developer – and those of you who have been watching have seen the shift from strictly “let’s show PHP developers that ASP.NET is cool” to “and let’s show PHP developers that we understand that PHP is cool”, a result of learning from day-to-day work with PHP developers. The sheer mass of PHP-focused voices that this combination would bring would make PHP absolutely fundamental to the company. Many of these developers are actively contributing to code beyond the core Yahoo! web platform and are leaders in their own right.

And, finally, we’ve taken a great leap forward in Windows/Linux Interoperability in both virtualization (SuSE Linux on Hyper-V) and protocols (identity, management, file systems, networking), with major customer, partner, and engineering commitments. I have no access to information on Yahoo!’s server farms, but I expect Microsoft + Yahoo would accelerate our capabilities in Windows/ Linux interoperability significantly as well. The modern datacenter is a heterogeneous environment, and I have heard over and over again from customers the value they place on our recognition and technical competency supporting that real-world heterogeneity.

The world is different today than it was 10 years ago, and so are we. Here on the Redmond campus, MacBook Pros aren’t unheard of, and people with knowledge of Linux are in demand. Some of those MacBooks are running Vista, administrators are running PHP and ASP.NET on the same machine, and we’re seeing adoption of open source in and on top of a range of Microsoft technologies. As the world has changed, so has Microsoft, to the benefit of the company and our customers. This would be an exciting next step—here’s hoping!