Working with Azure Table Storage from PHP

Introduction

Windows Azure Table Storage is a non-relational structured storage system in the cloud that offers massive scalability, durability and high availability.  The service is exposed with a RESTful API.  As such, it is easily consumable from a variety of platforms, including PHP.  In this post, I will illustrate how to consume Azure Table Storage via the RESTful API.  It is important to note that on July 31, 2009 we will reach Milestone 2 on the PHP SDK for Windows Azure.  Milestone 2 focuses on support for Azure Table Storage.  Accordingly, in all of the code you see in this blog post and the accompanying screencasts (Part I and Part II) illustrate accessing Azure Table Storage the “hard way”.  Much of the work I had to do by hand in the accompanying example here will be taken care of for you by the SDK.  That said, let’s dig in…

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Azure Application Part 2: Access Azure Table Storage

This is part 2 in this series where I am building an Azure shopping cart application from the ground up.  In this post, I will create a simplified ASP.NET version of the wine catalog.  We will create a table in developer storage (the local version of Azure Storage) to store our wines and write 2 web pages: 1 to view all wines and another to add a wine.  We will then access the same table in the cloud in Azure Table Storage.

(In part 1 I prepared my environment by setting up my development environment, creating a Windows Azure Account and creating a Hosted Service account.  I then created a Web Cloud Service project in Visual Studio and wrote a very simple “Hello, World” example.  I ran this sample locally and debugged it.  I then deployed it to the cloud.)  

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