The software giant Microsoft on Wednesday announced PHP SDK (Software Development Kit) for PHP developers building open-source applications for Microsoft Azure Cloud Platform. Microsoft announced the PHPAzure SDK developed to help PHP developers develop faster.  

The PHPAzure SDK is designed to facilitate programming to Windows Azure and blobs, tables, and queues of the underlying SQL-like Windows Azure Storage service. The open-source project, PHPAzure has been developed with RealDolmen and hosted on Microsoft's CodePlex site.

The community technology preview (CTP) of PHPAzure SDK was revealed by Microsoft India. The PHPAzure SDK is due for completion on August 21. Currently in CTP, the PHPAzure will be delivered by the end of 2009.  

"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," said Vijay Rajagopalan, principal architect, Microsoft.

Microsoft Azure Services Platform is a cloud platform offering to "provide a wide range of internet services, which could be consumed from both on-premises environments and the internet". The Azure Services Platform uses a specialized operating system, called Windows Azure.