Zend – one of the lead commercial sponsors behind PHP – and Microsoft have had an ongoing relationship over the last few years to make PHP a first class citizen on Windows Servers.
Now Microsoft is help PHP to take the next step, into the cloud.
Today Zend Framework 1.10 was released including support for Microsoft Windows Azure cloud services. Zend Framework is a PHP framework for application development and deployment that already has benefited from contributions from IBM, Google and others.
The new Zend_Service_WindowsAzure component was actually contributed by
Microsoft to the open source Zend Framework project. It enables to PHP developers to call Windows Azure APIs from within PHP applications.
“The ubiquity, simplicity and flexibility of PHP make it ideal for
building cloud applications. Native Windows Azure support in Zend
Framework 1.10 brings the power of Windows Azure to a substantial
community of Zend Framework users,”said Zeev Suraski, Chief Technology
Officer and Co-founder of Zend in a statement.
Is this a good thing for open source?
Sure it is. Azure is just another deployment option and with the new Zend Framework capabilities PHP developers now have yet another choice.
It’s also great to see open source contributions from Microsoft like this one. Microsoft’s goal is to make it’s platforms the ones that developers – any developers PHP or otherwise – want to deploy on. By making this open source code donation they’re making a good step forward in their goal, at least for PHP developers.
