Eclipse Tooling for Windows Azure

 

If you’ve been following the recent developments on Windows Azure, you are probably aware that the July CTP of Windows Azure introduced support for FastCGI.  One of the benefits of supporting FastCGI is the ability to run PHP applications in the Azure fabric. 

If you are a developer using the Eclipse IDE, this month marks another milestone with the release of the “Windows Azure Tools for Eclipse”, a project that provides a complete toolkit for Windows Azure development, right inside the Eclipse IDE.

I’ve been playing around with an early build, and have been really impressed.

The tooling adds support to an existing PHP project (using PDT) so that it can run on Windows Azure, integrates with the local fabric so that you can test applications running on your local developer box before deploying, and includes an explorer for interrogating storage elements of Windows Azure. 

You can find out more about the project here.  If you are using Eclipse 3.5 today, the update URL is http://www.windowsazure4e.org/update.  Full instructions for downloading can be found here.

I’m planning to cover this in some detail in one of my sessions at TechEd Europe (INT02-IS Working with the OSS Community: Cloud Computing Interoperability).  If you have thoughts on what else you would like to see in a session with such a title, do let me know!