Yesterday at the Eclipse Summit Europe in Ludwigsburg, Germany, Microsoft announced two exciting new open source projects that will make it easier for PHP and Java developers to work with Windows Azure.  Both projects were created in collaboration with Soyatec, a France-based IT solutions provider.

The first project, Windows Azure Tools for Eclipse, helps PHP developers to use Eclipse to author Windows Azure projects.  From the Interoperability @ Microsoft blog:

Windows Azure Tools for Eclipse provides a series of wizards and utilities that allow developers to write, debug, and configure for and deploy PHP applications to Windows Azure. It is available for download at www.windowsazure4e.org

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The plug-in also bundles the existing Windows Azure SDK for PHP, which we introduced a few months ago.

The second project, Windows Azure SDK for Java, is a client library for accessing Windows Azure storage from Java.  This library was used in the creation of the “Storage Explorer” feature of the Eclipse extension.

We on the Windows Azure team are excited about both of these projects, which are part of our ongoing work to provide a great platform experience for all developers.

The announcements yesterday also included an enhanced Eclipse experience on Windows 7 and version 1.0 of the Eclipse Tools for Silverlight.  Read more on the  Interoperability @ Microsoft blog.