It turns out that Azure Websites - to support other platforms that require compiling - actually has an extremly robust deployment system (as far as I understood its internals). If Composer fails during this step, the website will still be served from the currently running version and you don't have to face unexpected downtime. To actually run Composer as a post-deployment tool you have to do some manual work.

This manual work comes in the form of a special ".deployment" file included in the root of your repository that defines the command to execute (a custom script). Included there at the end of the post is the PHP code you'll need to put in this custom script to get the latest version of composer and then require the phar file for use later in your application.

The first article in this mini-series on creating geolocation apps with the backend hosted in Windows Azure Websites is going to be a walkthrough of the PHP code that we'll host in Windows Azure. The PHP site will be simple and expose just a few methods. Prior to getting into the code for the service, we need to setup a new website in Windows Azure and set up our database.

He walks you through some of the initial steps to create the PHP side of things - setting up the website instance and database, downloading the Silex PHP framework and the PHP code to get process the latitude and longitude of the current user. Also included is code to help find "interesting" points near the user and code to allow the user to add their own.

Market Leader,Inc. is graciously hosting the venue for Seattle PHP Meetup in Kirkland, WA this month!! In fact, Ariz Jacinto (long-time member & frequent presenter at our Meetups), an employee of Market Leader, Inc., has gone bonkers and lined up a killer night for us all! Note the entrance and then celebrate the FREE PARKING!!

Brian Swan is a Microsoft advocate for PHP on Windows and Jesse Keating is the release engineer for Fedora Core. There's still time to RSVP on Meetup and attend this event - be sure to sign up so they know how many to expect!

Azure is just impossible to use for PHP today. This is a fact. Doesn't matter which way you look at it, it just su.. isn't particularly good. The amount of steps you need to make, the knowledge you need to have and the fact that you can only deploy from Windows host are some of the things which make it a very painful experience. I had enough of this pain.

The service helps you make quick and easy Azure deployments. Features include multiple datacenter support, your choice of PHP versions (5.2 or 5.3) and the ability to deploy in "production" or "development" environments. You can find out more about the service here.