The goal of this camp was to get the European PHP community leaders together and learn about the new products and new ideas Microsoft are working on. For those of you who read about the Microsoft web developer summit that took place in Redmond in December 2009 you might think it was the same thing however you would be utterly wrong.

While the camp in Redmond was very informative and we are learnt a great deal of new features coming up with Microsoft, it was vastly different than the JumpinCamp in Zurich where the focus of the camp was to get the developers to interact with the actual Microsoft developers instead of only learning about new features. The point of the JumpinCamp was to get your hands dirty in code so we all got a few hours of lectures, then sat down and worked on either implementing those solutions into our respective Open Source projects or even discussed and raised concerns we might have regarding some of their products.

I thought it might be nice to share some of the projects I’ve started working on while I was over there and what I had interests in:

OData

After meeting with Claudio Caldato, the program manager for the Interoperability team, we went over the OData project and after looking at the position of OData and it’s potential, I decided to join the team and start by developing a PEAR package that will allow producers to publish valid OData Atom Pub feeds and serve as a base driver for the PHP community (Which could be easily ported to Zend Framework, Symfony, Lithium, etc.)

Obviously one of the reason for and OData producer package is to be able to make all the Frapi users potential OData producers. Moreover, as some of you know, sometimes I get into rants about web semantics and microformat. When I saw OData I realized that we could potentially bring some microformat standards within OData Atom Pub feeds (Or JSON Feeds).

Another thing that lit me up was the JSON feed. As some of you may have read on this very blog a few months ago I wrote an article about having something called PJSF which basically is the concept or idea of defining a standard format for JSON feeds. When I saw that OData has the ability to generate JSON feeds, I obviously jumped on the occasion of making a difference in the semantics world

Azure

Azure basically is a platform that offers a flexible, familiar environment for developers to create cloud applications and services. With Windows Azure, you can shorten your time to market and adapt as demand for your service grows.

What does is really mean? Azure is an all-in-one cloud solution. Even though the concepts are a bit arduous to grasp, we can all thank Josh Holmes and Maarten Balliauw for their essential presence at this camp to help us with all the questions we had and their thorough understanding of their baby (Azure).

Azure was another thing that sprung to my mind for Frapi. What if we could get our Frapi customers to be deployed directly into the cloud? Obviously it’s possible to hack around all the possible Amazon web services and to get somewhat arranged so our customers would be on EC2 servers, however with Azure it seems almost natural to deploy and it’s clearly made for enterprises.

TableStorage

This is Microsoft’s very own NoSQL answer. The Table service offers structured storage in the form of tables. It also exposes a REST API for working with tables and the data that they contain.

This one I am still uncertain about. I think I like it, but I’ll have to work a bit more into finding more information regarding it’s internals. I really like the idea of their multiple slave replication however with the lack of documentation I could not, right now, take the executive decision of opting for TableStorage instead of say CouchDB or MongoDB. Nevertheless, the fact that it’s part of Azure gives it a big +1.

Pivot

Alex is probably one of the coolest guy to hang out with and also has a brilliant product called Pivot. I couldn’t tell you much more about Pivot apart from the fact that it’s a great tool if you want have to analyze large amounts of data with many different criteria. Seriously though, check it out, his demo and seeing it live is simple stunning. He also briefly introduced me to the art of DeepZooming and the SeaDragon technology

Altogether I suggest you give the livelabs a look. They are doing some amazing work there!

SQL Server

Even though I haven’t been into the RDBMS world for quite a while now (Being sucked into #nosql), I used to do quite a bit of SQL Server, in fact I’m still involved in the SQL Server MDB2 package and it was nice to finally be able to discuss with a developer of the SQL Server Engine Jason Stowe and the Program Manager of the SQL Server Connectivity with PHP Ashay Chaudhary (Who is now on twitter @ashay_c!) about the status of the SQL Driver in PHP (Or lack thereof) and intensively vent about a few things like the lack of up-to-date PDO SQL Server driver.

Fair play to both the SQL Server guys who have done a brilliant job at the camp helping everyone that needed help as well!

WebDeploy

This is definitely one of the tools I would have like to have 1-2 more days to play with. After a filled in event and work week, I finally managed to get some time to discuss the potential of deploy Frapi on Windows machines with the lovely Faith Allington. After playing for a few hours we had the base of the package however the day was ending and we were going to a lounge. Having our priorities set very straight in conferences, most of us headed out to the bar/lounge and so we didn’t have time to finish the Frapi WebDeploy implementation. Faith being of good nature gave me her email address and told me we could setup a conference call and keep working on the WebDeploy implementation of Frapi! How about that!

Finally

During this week, not only did I learn loads of stuff about Microsoft product, I also learnt some russian card game which encourages cheating (lovely!), I learnt how to say: “Ich lebe in einem Pilz!” and how to play cow-poo-golf. Great Switzerland!

On a more serious note however, I would just like to finish on the usual cheesy note and say thanks to Microsoft and especially Yuriy Zaytsev for organizing, Josh Holmes for his general welcoming and helpful attitude, Nicole Zahnd for organizing the flights and hotels perfectly and obviously everyone from the Microsoft team that stayed with us this week and listened to our rants and complaints about their product! Looking forward to next year (wink)

Note: This post is for PHP and Ruby Developers based in or near Dublin, Ireland.

There’s no denying that Cloud Computing has been a particularly hot space for the last year. I’m sure many of you have given Amazon Web Services (Infrastructure as a Service) and Google App Engine (Platform as a Service) a go by now, if not actually using them to run software of your own making.

In the last year the buzz from Microsoft on their Azure offering has been gradually getting louder, to the point where they are now rolling it out. Microsoft’s proposition is interesting as, in simple terms, it’s a like a mix between the IaaS and PaaS models that are pursued by Amazon and Google.  As part of their drive to let developers know about Azure, Microsoft have been reaching out to development communities that would traditionally be non-Microsoft centric — in particular PHP and Ruby.

For example, in late 2009 both David and Helgi were invited by Microsoft to their head office in Redmond for a summit of 25 PHP developers from around the world. Over the course of a few days they were given an insight into Microsoft’s plans for Azure and PHP, amongst other things. You can read more about what they learned in Helgi’s blog post on the summit.

Overall, I think reaching out and engaging with different development communities is a smart move by Microsoft, as PHP and Ruby communities make up a large proportion of the international web app development workforce. I think it also lends Microsoft a bit more credibility in Open Source circles.

All that aside, Azure has a beefy infrastructure behind it. In the last two years Microsoft have built a number of half-billion dollar data centres around the world. I was lucky enough to see their Irish one up close. The place is HUGE, everything seemed to be designed with scale, sustainability and security in mind.

So, this month echolibre and Microsoft are bringing Josh Holmes to Dublin to talk directly to Irish developers about building and deploying web apps on the Azure platform. This free event takes place on Sunday 21st February at 19:30, in the Radisson Hotel on Golden Lane. You can book your place here.

This event is a good opportunity for anyone looking to get up and running with a cloud based development project. I’m sure the mix of Ruby and PHP people will probably lead to some interesting conversations afterwards

Finally, I’d just like to say that Josh Holmes is a passionate soul who gets his kicks solving problems with deep fried awesomeness.