Windows Azure SDK for PHP Developers

1. What is Windows Azure SDK for PHP Developers?

As part of Microsoft’s commitment to Interoperability, this open source project is an effort bridge PHP developers to Windows Azure. PHPAzure is an open source project to provide software development kit for Windows Azure and Windows Azure Storage – Blobs, Tables & Queues

• Overview
  • Enables PHP developers to take advantage of the Microsoft Cloud Services Platform – Windows Azure.
  • Provides consistent programming model for Windows Azure Storage (Blobs, Tables & Queues)
• Features
  • PHP classes for Windows Azure Blobs, Tables & Queues (for CRUD operations)
  • Helper Classes for HTTP transport, AuthN/AuthZ, REST & Error Management
  • Manageability, Instrumentation & Logging support
  • Support for storing PHP sessions in Azure Table Storage

Read the Getting Started guide or the tutorials over at the Eclipse tooling project for more info on developing with the Windows Azure SDK for PHP and to learn more about the Windows Azure SDK for PHP Architecture.

2. Project contributors

Windows Azure SDK for PHP is an open source collaboration project driven by RealDolmen and Microsoft, based on a blog post of Maarten Balliauw.


The RealDolmen Microsoft Competence Centre is occupied with the supply of made-to-measure professional Microsoft solutions to customers and is the largest Microsoft integrator in Belgium. RealDolmen has over 10 years of experience of complete implementation of Microsoft projects in terms of strategy, architecture, implementation, integration of systems, maintenance, training as well as support.


Microsoft is the project sponsor and provides Architectural & Technical Guidance on its Windows Azure platform.

3. What is Windows Azure?

Windows Azure is the name for Microsoft’s Software + Services platform, an operating system in the cloud providing services for hosting, management, scalable storage with support for simple blobs, tables, and queues, as well as a management infrastructure for provisioning and geo-distribution of cloud-based services, and a development platform for the Azure Services layer.

How does the Windows Azure SDK for PHP fit in?

Refer the Architecture page.

Logical architecture

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

An application built using Windows Azure SDK for PHP can access Windows Azure's features, no matter if it is hosted on the Windows Azure platform or on an in-premise web server.

Resources

• Webcasts, videos, virtual labs and podcasts - http://www.microsoft.com/events/series/azure.aspx
• Azure training kit (including PHP samples) - http://www.microsoft.com/azure/trainingkit.mspx
• Other Azure SDK's http://www.microsoft.com/azure/sdk.mspx
• How do I.... videos - http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/dd439432.aspx
• PHP on Windows Training Kit - http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?displaylang=en&FamilyID=c8498c9b-a85a-4afa-90c0-593d0e4850cb

4. Roadmap

The following milestones are planned for next few months.

Milestone 1: May 15, 2009 (Alpha/Community Technology Preview)

The focus of this release is around architecture, infrastructure and shared components that all Windows Azure storage types share. We are excited to show you our initial thinking of the project and an initial API for Windows Azure blob storage. We look forward to your feedback and feature requests.

Features included in the Alpha build are:

• Windows Azure Blob Storage
  • CRUD on storage containers
  • Setting metadata on storage containers
  • Setting ACL on storage containers
  • CRUD on blobs (in storage containers)
  • Setting metadata on blobs
  • Listing and searching blobs in containers
• Helper Classes for HTTP transport, AuthN/AuthZ, REST & Error Management

Milestone 2: July 31, 2009 (Feature Completion)

This release will focus on Windows Azure table storage. The following features will be included:

• SharedKey Lite authentication (for local table storage service from SDK)
• Query Tables - Enumerates the tables in a storage account.
• Create Table - Creates a new table within a storage account.
• Delete Table - Deletes a table from a storage account.
• Query Entities - Queries data in a table.
• Insert Entity - Inserts a new entity into a table.
• Update Entity - Updates an existing entity within a table by replacing it.
• Merge Entity - Updates an existing entity within a table by merging new property values into the entity.
• Delete Entity - Deletes an entity within a table.
• Entity group transactions - Providing transaction support on a group of entity operations.

Milestone 3: August 21, 2009 (Final)

This release will focus on Windows Azure queue storage as well as final release of the full Windows Azure SDK for PHP.

The following features will be included:

• List Queues - Lists all queues under the given account.
• Create Queue - Creates a new queue under the given account.
• Delete Queue - Deletes a queue.
• Get Queue Metadata - Returns queue properties, including user-defined metadata.
• Set Queue Metadata - Sets user-defined metadata on the queue.
• Put Message - Adds a message to the queue.
• Get Messages - Retrieves a message from the queue and makes it invisible to other consumers.
• Peek Messages - Retrieves a message from the front of the queue, without changing the message visibility.
• Delete Message - Deletes a specified message from the queue.
• Clear Messages - Clears all messages from the queue.