Maarten Balliauw has a new post to his blog with some resources you can use if you're looking to get started using PHP and Azure for your application.

The good reason for not being that active on my blog lately is the fact that I'm producing content for Microsoft's Interoperability team. Have you ever wanted to start working with Windows Azure and PHP? No idea where to start? Meet the official portal: Developing Applications for Azure with PHP.

He also links to a few specific resources that are cover Azure+Eclipse, the Azure SDK, using the Queue and using blob storage.

Brian Swan has posted a new timeline to his MSDN blog today about the road that Microsoft has traveled with PHP to get to where they are today.

This morning I came across this article on PHPDeveloper.org: Blast from the Past - One Year Ago in PHP. That brief look into the past got me to thinking about what Microsoft has done lately toward PHP interoperability. (By "lately", I mean in the last few years.) And, I've been working on a presentation for TechEd in Berlin next month that will, in part, provide a brief overview of Microsoft's efforts toward PHP interoperability and support. So, I thought I'd share a bit of that summary here

The timeline runs from back in 2006 when PHP and Windows/IIS/SQL Server just wasn't much of an option through the FastCGI and SQL Server driver years and finally rounding out with WinCache, PHP 5.3 improvements for Windows and the Azure SDK for PHP.

Matthew Weier O'Phinney (of the Zend Framework project) had an opportunity to attend the Symfony Live event held in Paris and presented on integrating the two frameworks (usually seen as rivals by much of the PHP community).

To be honest, I was a little worried about the conference -- many see Symfony and ZF as being in competition, and that there would be no cross-pollination. I'm hoping that between Fabien, Stefan, and myself, we helped dispel that myth this week. The fact of the matter is that no single project can be fully comprehensive, and do everything perfectly.

He talks a bit more about the real difference between most of the MVC frameworks out there (tooling and communities) and each framework's development goals. Matthew's goal was to show Symfony developers that it's not just about staying within the ecosystem of your selected framework when developing - you need to branch out and find the right tool for the job. Sometimes that's found in the Zend Framework, other times it's elsewhere.

A big topic in the world of PHP recently has been interoperability between libraries. With the release of PHP 5.3 and the introduction of namespaces some discussion of new standards around the use of namespaces to promote the interoperability of autoloader implementations has started.

The goal of this blog post is to reach out to the all the PHP open source projects and applications in hopes to get them to join our initiative and give a vote for approval. If we can get the entire community behind this initiative it will make it much easier to get acceptance by the PHP core team and get this standard advocated in the manual on php.net.

If your project is interested in joining the initiative please join the google group http://groups.google.com/group/php-standards and help us change PHP for the better!

Ant Phillips looks a bit at some interoperability between the PHP and Project Zero when to comes to using the COM/.NET extension.

Zero doesn't currently support the COM/.NET extension in PHP. No matter though, there is a handy open source project called JACOB that bridges between Java and COM/.NET. In fact, there is an easier way to do this using a Groovy library called Scriptom. This is really just a friendly wrapper around JACOB to provide a better syntax for calling methods and accessing properties.

He also includes a quick introduction and howto on getting the functionality up and working in a Windows environment - download, add the JAR to your path, edit your php.ini and copy and paste some example code in to see it in action.

Wez Furlong has posted a request for some questions to help things along for an upcoming panel discussion he's going to be on at this year's MIX.

As I mentioned previously, I'll be at MIX this year on a panel discussing ASP and PHP interoperability, along with Jesse Liberty, Bill Staples, Joe Stagner and Brian Goldfarb.

I've been told that MIX has sold out and that there is a lot of interest in our slot, so I'm sure we'll have plenty to talk about, but I'm looking for questions to break the ice and get things rolling.

If you know a little bit about the topic and would like to help out with questions of your own, send them along to Wez via email - wez@php.net.

Despite opinions from some of the PHP community, interoperability between PHP applications isn't is such a bad state - at least According to Aaron Wormus:

The fact of the matter is that it's not such a big deal. Porting a plugin from Wordpress to Serendipity is usually trivial, and as we see more web-services based plugins (stuff like the awesome askimet) the task becomes simpler and simpler.

Interoperability is overrated, the more you think of it the more complex it gets. As you start throwing in new factors into the equation (how will this interoperate with a java/c# application) you start to develop monsters like JSR 170 which solve a lot of problems on paper, but in reality are too unwieldy to be truly useful.

He even lists out some of his "steps to interoperability" to help speed things along (like "use as much abstract code as possible" and "use services").

In another of the series of interviews over on the Zend Developer Zone, Cal Evans got a few minutes with QEDWiki developer Stuart Nicholas to talk about QEDWiki, his talk at this year's Zend/PHP Conference and Expo, and merging J2EE and PHP.

Since QEDWiki is one of the coolest things I've seen in a while I can't help but feel that his session at ZendCon is going to be cool too. I since I love cool, I decided to give Stuart a call to see if I could get a sneak preview.

There's only the two questions but the answers are interesting. Cal asks about some of the contents of Stuart's talk (the sneak peak) and some about the interoperability between PHP and J2EE that's on the way.

It seems like every time you turn around, there's always someone going on about the "latest and greatest" framework that's just popped up and how it'll change the way you write your code. Of course, not all of them are all their cracked up to be, and in his new post Jared White looks at some of the things they'd need to be to make it.

He starts with a clean slate, looking first at what a framework really is, it's usefulness, and a few of the general issues that surround their use. Also, based on the latest PHP stats (from Nexen.net), the gap between the use of PHP4 and PHP5 is still very large, making developing frameworks a bit more tricky.

Jared also lists out three objectives that the future of PHP will have to hold to make this gap get any smaller (and make developing applications a simpler process). Basically:

• adoption for PHP 5.1+ needs to increase dramatically
• standardized design patterns need to be established
• a general need for interoperability between frameworks/applications.