Search results matching tag 'Community'

Windows Cache Extension 1.0 for PHP Released

Anonymous — Fri, 20 Nov 2009 00:40:00 GMT

The Microsoft Internet Information Services (IIS) team announced today the release of Windows Cache Extension 1.0 for PHP, a PHP accelerator that is used to increase the speed of PHP applications running on Windows and Windows Server. This is a production-ready release that is provided under an open source BSD license, with the source code hosted and maintained here, and the documentation hosted on php.net.

You can find more details on this release on IIS team Product Unit Manager Mai-lan Tomsen Bukovec's blog.

WinCache extension is a significant open source contribution from Microsoft to the PHP on Windows community. The extension code is hosted and maintained on PHP Extensions Community Library (PECL) and is available for everyone to view, branch, compile, and contribute to.

The IIS team also invites the PHP development community to join it in development of this caching extension for PHP on Windows. There have already been some contributions from the community whileWinCache was in the pre-release mode, and IIS team is looking forward to having others join this new PHP on Windows caching project.

Also, in time for this release, an independent PHP company - Ibuildings - has conducted a benchmark test with the WinCache RTW bits and published the results.

The release of this production-ready PHP accelerator for Windows is an important step towards making the Windows operating system an even better platform for hosting PHP applications.

WinCache extension significantly improves performance of PHP applications and lowers CPU load on the server. This, together with the fact that no application code changes are necessary to take advantage of the caching, makes WinCache a must have extension when running PHP on Windows.

More information about the WinCache extension for PHP can be found as follows:

The PECL documentation on WinCache
The PHP on Windows feature team blogs (Kanwal, Ruslan, and Don)
The WinCache community forum
The IIS.NET documentation on WinCache
The WinCache on PECL source code, licensed under BSD
How to file bugs on WinCache in PECL

Zend Launches Open Source Initiative to Drive Cloud Application Development

Anonymous — Tue, 22 Sep 2009 14:00:00 GMT

Today, Zend Technologies announced the Simple API for Cloud Application Services project, which is a new open source initiative that allows developers to use common application services in the cloud, while enabling them to unlock value-added features available from individual providers.

This new project is designed to encourage widespread participation and contributions from the open source community, resulting in the availability of Simple Cloud API adapters for virtually all major cloud providers.

Zend, Microsoft, IBM, Nirvanix, Rackspace and GoGrid are all co-founding contributors to this community project, which aims to facilitate the development of cloud applications that can access services on all major cloud platforms and whose initial goal is to provide a set of programming interfaces for PHP developers to facilitate the development of applications that have basic cloud storage needs.

The first deliverables will include interfaces for file storage, document database, and simple queue services from platforms like Amazon Web Services, Windows Azure, Nirvanix Storage Delivery Network and Rackspace Cloud Files, allowing developers to deploy software applications to access services in these environments without making time consuming and expensive changes to their source code.

As Andi Gutmans, the CEO at Zend Technologies, notes in the press release announcing the project, "cloud computing offers irresistible value to enterprises of all sizes, but the lack of portability across cloud application services for even the most basic operations has been an impediment to broader adoption of cloud services."

An initial Simple Cloud API proposal and reference implementation is already available now for community review and participation, while a technology preview of the PHP client libraries for Windows Azure can be found here.

Microsoft is also contributing Simple Cloud API adapters, along with the official PHP client libraries for Windows Azure storage, to future versions of Zend Framework. These adapters will allow applications to take advantage of many Windows Azure features through the Simple Cloud API interface, while Microsoft's client libraries will put Windows Azure innovations, such as transaction and partial upload support, at the fingertips of cloud application developers.

"The Simple Cloud API is an example of Microsoft's continued investment in the openness and interoperability of its platform. We're excited to see how this project will foster adoption of cloud computing platforms by PHP developers and hope that many of these developers are encouraged to use Windows Azure," Doug Hauger, the General Manager for Windows Azure, notes in the press release.

Microsoft's involvement started a few months ago, through our work with Real Dolmen on a Windows Azure SDK for PHP developers. This SDK has been submitted to the Zend Framework, and it now forms the basis of Microsoft's contribution to the Simple Cloud API project.

As Vijay Rajagopalan, a Principal Architect at Microsoft, notes in his blog, the Zend Could Adapter for Windows Azure will leverage Microsoft's contribution. PHP developers will now be able to program against Windows Azure - in a way that is consistent with other cloud platforms - by tapping into the main features of Window Azure Storage.

Those PHP developers who need to use specific Windows Azure features not included in the scope of the Simple Cloup API (like transaction), will be able to combine the Zend Cloud Adapter with the dedicated Windows Azure SDK for PHP.

"This will allow developers to use common application services in the cloud, while enabling them to unlock value-added features available from individual providers. Simple API for Cloud also gives PHP developers more choices, and this is a great opportunity for them to think about using Windows Azure," he says.

More on the Hyper-V Linux Integration Components

Anonymous — Mon, 20 Jul 2009 20:24:00 GMT

Well, there is no easy way to say this, so I am simply going to start this blog with the following line.

Microsoft just submitted source code for the Hyper-V Linux Integration Components to the Linux Kernel Community Under GPL v2.

Well, there's a conversation starter! Are you still all sitting in your chairs???

Let me summarize:

Yes, our device driver code was released directly to the Linux Kernel
We released the code under GPL v2
We are working with Greg Kroah-Hartman so it is ready for the next release of the Linux Kernel, version 2.6.32
We will continue to update the driver code to enhance interoperability on an ongoing basis, but it's our hope that other developers in the community will find the code useful and worthy of collaboration.

Fallen off your chair yet?

Microsoft developed the Linux device drivers to enhance the performance of Linux when virtualized on Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V. My team and I were responsible for testing and validating the driver components that were contributed for this first release.

Now, my team and I will be responsible for further developing this code going forward. (Yes, that does mean that I have gone back to leverage my very early roots as a Kernel programmer. Let the world be warned!!!!). Haiyang Zhang has been working on this code with me, and he will continue to work with me on this going forward.

When I joined Microsoft three years ago, the primary reason was to put my money where my mouth was. You see complaining about something is easy, but it becomes a little more complicated when somebody offers you the opportunity to be part of helping change what you have complained about.

So, three years after taking the job that made me put my money where my mouth was (and still often is!), I for one am EXTREMELY happy to see one of the most significant fruits of our work here in the Microsoft Open Source Technology Center (OSTC). But I have to say, even I would have been hard-pressed to think three years ago that we would consider contributing to the Linux Kernel.

As you know, two years ago Microsoft announced a partnership with Novell, and Tom Hanrahan ran the lab on a day to day basis till about 9 months ago. Since then I have had the pleasure of running the technical side of the execution of that lab under Tom Hanrahan for the OSTC. One of the primary tasks for that lab is to make sure Windows runs well on top of XEN and Linux runs well on top of Hyper-V, and we do this in very close cooperation with Novell.

We do most of this work as an extension to Mike Neil's Hyper-V team.

As part of this, we were asked to help develop and maintain a crucial part of this work called the Linux Integration Components. This code is designed so that Linux can run in an "enlightened mode" on top of Hyper-V (enlightened mode is roughly the Hyper-V equivalent of "paravirtualized mode" for the Xen hypervisor). Without this driver code, Linux can run on top of Windows, but without the same high performance levels. It is this device driver code that we are releasing today, directly to the Linux Kernel.

We're not talking a few hundred lines of code here; we're talking about roughly 20,000 lines of code.

Is this a Dump and Run from Microsoft? Absolutely not! We plan to enhance the functionality of this code, and we will continue to work with the Linux Community to support the drivers and to ensure continued interoperability.

As you can imagine, this was the result of a lot of hard work: Hiyang Zhang, who has been co-writing this code; Hashir Abdi, who has been testing all this stuff; as well as Vijay Tewari and Mike Sterling from the Hyper-V team who have been taking care of the Hyper-V side.

And last, but certainly not least, Greg Kroah-Hartman, who has been helping me to make all this code land in the right area in the kernel. He has patiently worked to help me correct my obvious mistakes and to get the code contributed into the kernel.

So where are we today? Well, Greg Kroah-Hartman will make the code visible to the outside world today. (For those who want to get a head start, the code will sit under <your kernel tree>/drivers/staging/hv). After it becomes visible, I will write a few more blogs this week that should help you to understand, build and run them.

The titles I am thinking for these blogs are:

Where do the Linux ICs reside in the kernel tree and how do I build them?

And

How do I install, configure and run the Linux IC's?

I had almost forgotten how wrapped up you can be once you start writing code again. So I have not gotten much sleep this past week, but it has been a joy to get back into coding again!

Crafting a Better PHP Build Process on Windows – Part IV

Anonymous — Wed, 24 Jun 2009 00:12:00 GMT

In the previous post, I discussed what it took to use PGO on the Windows PHP build. That led to me building automated build scripts...

Automation as the root of all evil

"Anything that can be done for you, automatically, can be done to you, automatically." - David C. Wyland

First, I had to get the entire dependency stack into the mix. While some of the dependent libraries had VCProject files, some didn't. Worse, even if they had them, you couldn't tell with a degree of certainty that they were compiled with the same settings which would enable them to take advantage of PGO optimization.

I began taking each project, updating (or creating, using the Trace and mkProject tools) the Visual C++ project files that would use the same settings as the rest, and eventually came up with a solution file that had 74 projects in it - some of the projects generated more than one binary.

Next, I had to actually automate the process of creating the vcproject files. Once you've got the right dependencies, the PHP build process cranks out over 30 binaries when you include the PHP extensions that get built as part of the core.

After what seemed like a million compile-verify-tweak iterations, I had the tools that could generate VCProject files for the core PHP and all the extensions, provided it was all in the right place.

Next I wrote a .cmd batch script that went step-by-step, checking out the source, compiling the dependent libraries, building the PHP makefile, compiling PHP like the community did - and logging what it was doing, then switching to instrumentation, rebuilding the dependencies again, building the stack, PGO training it with test data and some applications (Wordpress, MediaWiki and phpBB) and then relinking it with optimization.

I got the .cmd script almost working, but it was fairly fragile. At that point I decided to switch batch scripting strategies and, in about a week, rewrote the batch script in JScript, which was far more flexible, and a lot more reliable.

What's next...

"The future always arrives too fast... and in the wrong order." - Alvin Toffler

During this process, I tweaked the build process that is generated quite a bit, adding in a few more applications to the PGO training, which cranks the performance up more and more.

Now, I can add in more scripts to assist with the training pretty trivially, but it still takes some effort to package up an entire application like MediaWiki or Wordpress and include it into the build process.

Even once I've added in an application, I end up doing a whole slew of comparative testing to see what impact it has on the final executables.

As time goes by, I'm sure there will be more tweaking to be done but, in all likelihood, any significant performance gains are going to be the result some modification of the PHP codebase itself.

Introducing NETOOP (The .NET Object Oriented Portal)

Anonymous — Wed, 10 Jun 2009 13:03:52 GMT

Yesterday I announced and new project I’m starting( READ HERE )

Since last night 40 people have joined the private wiki to participate in the collaborative design.

“The Project” now has a name and a domain !

NETOOP – the .NET Object Oriented Portal

www.netoop.com (Is were it will run……)

One of the commenters to my blog post asked,

What guiding patterns will you be using, and what technologies?

Is this an ASP.NET Ajax w/Linq to SQL thing?

Of course it will be ASP.NET and use Microsoft SQL Server but the rest is for us to discuss and decide.

In response to another question – ALL EXPERIENCE LEVELS ARE WELCOME.

One of the goals is for the end result to be ready to install, use, modify, and extend by ANY developer, so we NEED folks with all different experience levels.

You can sign up for a wiki account here [ Create Wiki Account ]

You can sign up for a forums account here [ Register for Forums Account ]

Join up – lets have some fun and do something cool together !

Technorati Tags: Microsoft,asp.net,open source,community

Crafting a better PHP build process on Windows – Part 1

Anonymous — Tue, 09 Jun 2009 18:22:00 GMT

The last several months, I've been working very deeply with PHP - specifically, compiling the PHP core itself, and looking for avenues for optimization. This is the first of four posts about the journey I've been on with PHP.

I get started building PHP

"It is a bad plan that admits of no modification" - Publilius Syrus

I started working with building PHP itself about a year ago. Initially, I was trying to put together an environment to compile up the PHP stack so that I could do some debugging, and track down a few faults that we were encountering in some of the PHP applications that we were trying to modify to use the SQL Server PHP driver that the SQL Server team here at Microsoft was creating.

Once I began to work with the source code, I found out very quickly that on top of having a hard time recreating the exact same binaries that the community build process generated, there were a large number of dependent libraries that were available in binary-only form and which were kept in a zip file that was passed around from developer to developer. That seemed a little odd for an open-source project, but I can certainly understand that over time, unless someone is working hard to keep it all together, these things happen.

Around the same time, the community had started to invest time and effort to 'clean up' the dependencies for building PHP on Windows, and move towards supporting VC9 (Visual Studio 2008) as an officially supported compiler.

In order to help in this process, I built out some testing environments in our Lab, which would let me compile up PHP on Windows and Linux, in order to get decent and reliable test results which we could use to identify any shortcomings that we could then address. This includes benchmarking not just the core PHP executable, but replicable and comparable testing of PHP applications such as Wordpress, MediaWiki, Gallery and phpBB.

PHP 5.3 on Windows: Not your father's PHP

"I'm looking for a lot of men who have an infinite capacity to not know what can't be done." - Henry Ford

For PHP 5.3, Pierre (and others) had gone out and found up-to-date versions of all the dependencies, brought them together, and managed to get them compiling with VC6 and VC9. They had posted these in binary and source form to the PHP Windows Internals site, which allows anyone to rebuild the PHP stack on Windows and, theoretically, get the same results as the 'official' build.

Jumping in at that point was much easier than it had been, as all you had to do was download the binaries of the libraries, check out the source code, run a few commands at the command line and, presto, you had your PHP executables.

At this point Pierre and I played around with the build flags on VC9 and found some settings that gave some pretty significant improvements to the speed of PHP vs. the speed of the VC6 version -and a lot of speed improvements vs. the old 5.2x line of PHP.

In Part II, I'll talk about going one step further with optimization.

Crafting a Better PHP Build Process on Windows – Part I

Anonymous — Tue, 09 Jun 2009 18:22:00 GMT

I get started building PHP

"It is a bad plan that admits of no modification" - Publilius Syrus

PHP 5.3 on Windows: Not your father's PHP

"I'm looking for a lot of men who have an infinite capacity to not know what can't be done." - Henry Ford

In Part II, I'll talk about going one step further with optimization.

PHP|Tek in Chicago

Anonymous — Thu, 28 May 2009 00:29:00 GMT

Last week I got the perfect excuse to get out of the Planning and Budget process that we are going through right now, attending PHP|Tek, which was a welcome escape as planning and budgeting in any company is usually enough fun to make a grown man cry!

So last week I went to PHP|Tek in Chicago to speak and meet folk from the PHP community. As always, I greatly enjoy meeting the people who write and use PHP, and I have been to and spoken with enough of the speakers at past events that I know a lot of the core people by first name.

Kind of funny that we now have gotten to the point inside of Microsoft that we are almost old hats at Open Source conferences

There were two days prior to the conference where a group of core PHP developers and community people talked about the state - past, present and future - of PHP. It was super cool to be invited to that one!

Unfortunately I was only able to join one of those two days: amazing that flying from Seattle to Chicago takes the better part of a day!

The discussions there where very wide ranging, from whether there will be a PHP 5.4, what 6.0 will bring, which bugs are current show stoppers, where PDO is going, etc. etc.

For me PHP|Tek remains a very nice ‘community' conference, where the focus is on the community of PHP and not the business/vendors of PHP.

These kinds of conferences are the best way to network, and it would take too long to talk about all the people I spoke to. But Elizabeth Smith and I talked about us writing documentation for php.net (I have been wanting to write the ‘how to build PHP for Windows' part) so hopefully look for more documentation written by Microsoft for php.net soon.

As always I talked to a lot of the usual suspects: Scott MacVicar, Andrei Zmievski, Derick Rethans, Sebastian Bergmann, Chris Shiflett, Cal Evans and others.

Oh, and if you are really bored, check out the latest May issue of php architect, which has a bunch of really cool articles about PHP and Windows. Some of them were even co-written by me, which gives you an idea how far php | architect has sunk to have people write articles for them

I just checked out the Website, and the May issue is not posted yet. But everybody who attended PHP|Tek got a copy of that issue in their goodies bag.

I always enjoy giving sessions and the session I did give at PHP|Tek was ‘PHP 5.3 The best PHP on Windows Yet' , and I got some really good feedback. I think I had about 40+ people in my session. People are always surprised to see Microsoft's involvement with PHP and what we have done with the community so far.

It is a talk I have given before. It starts with describing what the organization I belong to (the Microsoft Open Source Technology Center) does and how we work inside of Microsoft. After that I go into some detail about why PHP 5.3 is the best PHP on Windows.

Did you know that, for example, with PHP releases prior to 5.3, the code was build with libraries that were more than 10 years old and for which nobody really had any idea where the source code went? So it was built - linked rather - with object files that were more than 10 years old.

It makes it really hard to fix/improve stuff that you do not have the source code for

Well, pretty much all the issues of the past are now gone. I will make sure I write a blog about what truly went into PHP 5.3 for Windows soon, if the budgeting and planning process doesn't kill me before that point. In the meantime, here is a link to phpfreaks where, a few weeks ago, I posted a bunch of what we have been doing.

One really interesting thing is that there were a lot of Microsoft people at this conference, specifically from the DPE (Developer Platform Evangelism) side of Microsoft.

These are the people who are very much field and customer focused. From my conversations with them, they enjoyed the conference and were glad to get the opportunity to speak with a lot of the OS crowd. It is amazing how much we all have in common once we talk about technology.

Thanks to the people who put on the conference: of course Marco Tabini, the man behind PHP|Tek, but especially Elizabeth Naramore, who is the unsung hero that is the real driver behind keeping PHP|Tek running smoothly!

Announcing the PHP SDK for Windows Azure

Anonymous — Wed, 13 May 2009 00:29:00 GMT

Vijay Rajagopalan, a Principal Architect here at Microsoft, is at TechEd India, where he will demo later this week a new set of interoperability projects related to PHP.

These projects include the PHP SDK for Windows Azure, an open source effort for which Microsoft has provided funding, with development by RealDolmen, whose goal is to provide high-level abstractions that enable PHP developers to interoperate readily with Windows Azure.

The PHP SDK for Windows Azure focuses on REST and provides PHP classes for Windows Azure blobs, tables and queue, helper classes for HTTP transport, AuthN/AuthZ, REST and error management, as well as manageability, instrumentation and logging support.

Rajagopalan will also announce the launch of a series of projects that offer samples and a toolkit that enable PHP developers to include Silverlight controls, Microsoft Virtual Earth maps and IE Webslices and Accelerators in PHP web applications; as well as automatically generated a simple "Create, Read, Update, Delete (CRUD)" PHP application from a table in SQL Server.

These projects, for which Microsoft has provided funding and which are available on Codeplex under a BSD license, are yet another proofpoint of the company's commitment to interoperability, and developers will be happy to know that the first batch of these have already been developed by Accenture.

Read Rajagopalan's full blog here for all the details.

The Azure Services Platform has been designed to be open, standards-based and interoperable, and its support for XML, REST and SOAP standards means that any of the Azure services can be called from other platforms and programming languages.

Microsoft has provided funding for two other SDKs that support third party programming languages: Java SDK for Microsoft .NET Services and Ruby SDK for Microsoft .NET Services so as to facilitate interoperability between the Azure Services Platform and non-Microsoft languages and technologies.

The inclusion of FastCGI in Windows Azure's hosting environment was announced at MIX 2009, and the protocol enables developers to run web applications on Windows Azure that were written using third party programming languages, including PHP. This opens up new options for PHP developers to deploy their applications.

A Technology Preview of the PHP SDK for Windows Azure will be released under a BSD license, while a functionally complete version of the SDK, which will support tables and queues, should be available for download by this fall of 2009, but the team is calling on developers to provide feature requests, test the toolkit, and join the user forum.

So, stay tuned, as there's a whole lot more to come!

Apache Stonehenge: Interoperability at Work

Anonymous — Tue, 12 May 2009 17:24:00 GMT

The Stonehenge incubator project is approaching its first milestone: deploying the first set of samples and making them work together.

This is a really exciting development and continues to deliver on the project's primary goal: to provide practical applications that span languages and platforms and demonstrate how to achieve interoperability.

Multiple implementations of the Stonehenge Stocktrader sample application, including .NET, Java, PHP, Python and Ruby, have been committed to the repository. You can check the code here.

From a simplified architecture point of view, the Stonehenge Stocktrader application is built as follows:

A User Interface layer delivering the web front end (HTML)

A middle tier layer including a Business Services layer (login, account processing) and an Order Processing layer (buy/sell transactions)

A Data Access layer to provide access to the database for the middle tier layer (Business Services and Order Processing)

And, finally, the database where the application data lives

The work thus far has focused on the .NET, PHP, and Java interoperability scenarios, and the three Stocktrader implementations have been deployed in multiple configurations.

A series of tests were then run, mixing and matching the layers from the three implementations, playing with the configurations and leveraging the Web Services standards, including WS-Security, to provide message integrity and security.

A detailed "interoperability walkthrough" explaining all the different configurations has been posted here, while the full blog post by Kamaljit Bath, a Principal Program Manager in the Interoperability Technical Strategy Team at Microsoft, can be found here.

"Microsoft is pleased with its participation and the progress so far, and this new outcome from the Stonehenge project is very encouraging. With the implementation of the WS-* Standards, we get the benefit of distributed applications and platforms. We recognized that it is not always easy to achieve these goals, but I really feel this type of practical guidance will be helpful for these types of scenarios," said Bath.

The team is also actively soliciting comments and feedback, and encouraging both developers and users to participate in the project to ensure that the project continues to move in a direction that meets real people's needs.