During his keynote at the Open Source India conference, in Chennai, India this past Sunday, Vijay Rajagopalan, principal architect for Microsoft’s Interoperability Strategy team, presented the Interoperability Elements of a Cloud Platform and announced several new tools for PHP developers who want to build cloud applications for the Windows Azure platform.  You can read all about Vijay’s keynote here, which includes detailed descriptions of all the tools.  Below is a list of each tool, with a short overview and a link to more information.

• Windows Azure Companion (September 2010 Community Technology Preview (CTP)) is a new tool that aims to provide a seamless experience when installing and configuring PHP platform elements (PHP runtime, extensions) and Web applications running on Windows Azure.
• Windows Azure Tools for Eclipse for PHP (September 2010 Update) is a plug-in for PHP developers using the Eclipse development environment, which provides tools to create, test and deploy Web applications targeting Windows Azure.

• Windows Azure Command-line Tools for PHP (September 2010 Update) is a command-line tool, which offers PHP developers a simple way to package PHP based applications in order to deploy to Windows Azure.
• Windows Azure SDK for PHP (Version 2.0) enables PHP developers to easily extend their applications by leveraging Windows Azure services (like blobs, tables and queues) in their Web applications whether they run on Windows Azure or on another cloud platform.

If you’re looking for help getting started with the Windows Azure Companion, you can find a complete tutorial here. If you want to see a sample feed in action and the process for building it, check out Technical Consultant, Maarten Balliauw’s blog where he shares a custom feed and interesting options to play with.

Taken together, we hope these new tools promise to make it even easier to develop applications on the Windows Azure platform and demonstrate our ongoing commitment to openness, which spans the way we build products, collaborate with customers, and work with others in the industry.  Check them out and let us know what you think.  We look forward to hearing from you.

Tweet