New bridge between PHP and .NET development

Communications architecture for the PHP Toolkit for ADO .NET Data Services. Microsoft’s "Developer and Platform Evangelism Interoperability" team has launched its new "PHP Toolkit for ADO .NET Data Services" project, intended to act as a bridge between web programming language PHP and Microsoft’s .NET framework. The toolkit has been developed by Persistent Systems and made available on Microsoft’s Codeplex open source community site. For communications it makes use of the REST (Representational State Transfer) architecture.

It allows PHP developers to use metadata exposed by the new ADO.NET Data Services in their applications. The toolkit generates proxy classes at design time using XSLT (Extensible Style sheet Language Transformations), based on the metadata exposed by ADO.NET Data Services. Developers can then call these classes from their code at runtime using 'RESTful' services.

ADO.NET Data Services (codename "Astoria") is a library and collection of tools for reading and modifying volumes of data, which is included in .NET 3.5 Service Pack 1. ADO.NET Data Services is fully supported by the current Visual Studio 2008 SP1, and will also be supported by the forthcoming Visual Studio 2010.

REST has in recent years become an increasingly popular approach to developing web applications. It assigns a URL to each resource, which can then be accessed using HTTP methods such as GET, POST, PUT and DELETE.

(crve)