A number of industry leaders have comes together and made an announcement. A new Simple Cloud API is being developed for PHP, that will create an easy way to interface with any number of cloud services. The current contributors to this project include Zend, Microsoft, IBM, Rackspace, Nirvanix, and GoGrid. […]

Today a technology preview of upcoming interoperability between Windows Azure and Zend Framework has been announced, in the form of a PHP SDK for Windows Azure. […]

Maarten Balliauw has blogged about the fact that a new project has just been released on CodePlex: PHPPowerPoint. Just like with PHPExcel, PHPPowerPoint can be used to generate PPTX files from a PHP application. This can be done by creating an in-memory presentation that consists of slides and different shapes, which can then be written to disk using a writer (of which there’s currently only one for PowerPoint 2007). […]

The new year has just started, and to start off well the dutch PHP usergroup (phpGG) is organizing a frontend-oriented event. This event is intended for developers who get in touch with client-side technology. Not just PHP developers, also frontend developers, and everyone who has to deal with frontend stuff in some way. Whether you deal with frontends on a daily basis, or are curious to the possibilities of making a new application more attractive in a graphical sense, you can't miss out on this day. Besides all this, it's also an excellent opportunity to get a (free!) membership of phpGG! […]

You’ve already seen, in previous articles, just how easy it is to read and write Microsoft Excel spreadsheets with PHP and PEAR. But spreadsheets are just one way of representing structured data – the other, of course, is to use a database. Well, guess what? If your database happens to be Microsoft Access, PHP has you covered there as well! In this article, I’ll introduce you to PHP’s MDBTools extension, which provides an API to programmatically read data from Microsoft Access database files. If your project involves working with such files, extracting database records either for calculations or for conversion to other formats, you’ll find this extension invaluable. Come on in, and see how it works! […]

On his blog, Maarten Balliauw posted that he has started a new class library mimicing C#'s LINQ technology. […]

Microsoft announced a significant initiative which aims to provide the developer community with access to a large number of Microsoft protocols and file formats. Many of the specifications will be made available under the Microsoft Open Specification Promise (OSP) which enables both open-source and commercial companies to build implementations of the said specifications. […]

Tomas Petricek has an interesting post on his blog titled “Writing Silverlight applications in PHP”. In it he talks about using PHP inside of Silverlight applications. […]

Microsoft is releasing FastCGI for IIS6, meaning the shiny little “beta” tag is finally going the way of the dodo. What is FastCGI? I could go on for pages about the technical background, and Microsoft already has some great documentation on the subject, however I’ll put it in layman’s terms for those who aren’t Computer Science majors. […]

The IIS Team is eager to announce the official release of Microsoft FastCGI Extension for IIS 6.0 as a free download. For the first time, we are providing hosters and PHP developers full support for a stack of technology that enables reliable, scalable PHP hosting on production Internet Information Services 6.0 (IIS 6) Web servers. […]