Amongst the hype of bank holidays and a slightly-more-popular-than-usual wedding you may have missed the announcement that the Windows Azure SDK for PHP v3.0 Beta has been released. At the highest level this enables PHP developers to easily leverage Windows Azure services (tables, queues, blobs, diagnostic) in their web applications, a significant step forward in allowing PHP devs to publish to the cloud in a seamless way.
An open source collaboration project between RealDomen and Microsoft with heavy involvement from Maarten Balliauw, the Windows Azure SDK for PHP enables PHP developers to take advantage of the Microsoft Cloud Services Platform – Windows Azure. This includes support for Manageability instrumentation, logging, PHP classes for Azure Blobs, tables and queries, as well as helper classes for HTTP transport, AuhN/AuthZ, REST, and error management.
Windows Azure
We’ve talked quite a bit about Azure and the cloud on Ubelly, but as a refresher the Windows Azure platform, comprised of Windows Azure and SQL Azure lets developers build, host and scale apps through Microsoft datacentres. There’s a ton of broader features and benefits we won’t go into here, but click this way if you’d like to get into the detail.
Logical architecture
The Windows Azure SDK for PHP provides access to Windows Azure’s storage, computation and management interfaces by abstracting the REST/XML interface Windows Azure provides into a simple PHP API.
Deployment scenarios
It doesn’t matter if the app is hosted on the Windows Azure platform or resides on-premise, it can still access all features using the SDK for PHP. A nice little image to illustrate this:
V 3.0 Beta
So what’s new? As a summary:
- Breaking change: Table storage entities now return DateTime objects instead of strings for Edm.DateTime properties
- New feature: Service Management API in the form of Microsoft_WindowsAzure_Management_Client
- New feature: logging infrastructure on top of table storage
- Session provider now works on table storage for small sessions, larger sessions can be persisted to blob storage
- Queue storage client: new hasMessages() method
- Introduction of an autoloader class, increasing speed for class resolving
- Several minor bugfixes and performance tweaks
More info
The SDK is available on CodePlex here.
Maarten did a great blog highlighting the project here, but if you want broader info on Windows Azure for PHP visit the Windows Azure for PHP Interoperability Bridges site.
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