HYDERABAD, INDIA: With the vision of 'opening' up to a large ecosystem of developers and content designers, Microsoft announced today the release of the PHP SDK for Microsoft Azure, which allows PHP developers use the Azure to develop faster.

Taking this open initiative a step further, Microsoft has also funded for interoperability with other programming languages with its Java SDK for Microsoft .NET Services and Ruby SDK for Microsoft .NET services. .NET Services essentially is .NET on the Azure Services Platform.

Vijay Rajagopalan, principal architect, Microsoft said, “We at Microsoft have realized that we have been going after only the developers who focus on enterprise-class applications, and this where the concept of Silverlight comes from. Now we realize that there is a huge breed of what I call the ‘hobbyist’ developers who grasp languages swiftly and contribute a small chunk of a big application, or create small applications as part of a big project. Interoperability with platforms will expose these developers to the capabilities of the cloud.”

Another interesting initiative is the ability to port Silverlight on Eclipse. Now, a Silverlight developer can invoke instances or vice versa from Eclipse, making software development more pervasive and taking it to higher levels of being open. 

.NET on the cloud has three important components, a Service Bus, Access Control and Work Flow. The Service Bus is an HTTP based clearing house for third party platforms and applications. If a Java application needs to interact with one in a different environment, the Bus will form the messaging bridge based on the Access Control, which takes care of the authorization, Authentication and Registration. The Work Flow component orchestrates the connection effectively.

Speaking on the commercial viability of opening up the Azure platform, Vijay said, “Microsoft follows a scale up and scale out on demand architecture, where enterprises of any size can ‘instruct’ Azure to manually allocate computing power, and corresponding network capabilities on demand. This will ensure that the enterprise pays for only what it uses. Anyway, its open, so programming language is not a barrier anymore for cost effective software development. The whole system is so open that Azure lets you dictate how many instances of your application should be made and for how long. We are sure to find many takers for this option.”