Microsoft is touting for any though the capability for developers to use many different instruments,
Windows 7 Ultimate, like Java,
Windows 7 Key, PHP,
Microsoft Office Professional 2007, Ruby and Eclipse, when creating applications for Windows Azure. However the company will probably step up its Java support for Azure in the coming weeks and months, elevating Java to a “first-class citizen” inside the Microsoft cloud realm.The reasons Microsoft is interested in doing this aren;t hard to figure. There are lots of Java developers out there whom Microsoft would be excluding from its potential cloud customer base if it didn;t support anything beyond .Net. And Microsoft cloud competitors like VMware, Amazon and Google all have built Java support into their respective platforms.Exactly how Microsoft intends to up its Java support is fairly vague, beyond promises from executives at the Microsoft Professional Developers Conference this week. Microsoft execs told eWEEK that Microsoft will be focusing on improving Java performance,
Office 2010 Professional Plus, Eclipse tooling and client libraries for Windows Azure. This improved Java enablement will be available to customers in 2011,
Office Professional 2010, the Softies said. So far it;s murky as to which Java variants Microsoft will be targeting beyond “the ones customers want us to do,” as Microsoft execs said this week.“Our ultimate goal is to make Java as first-class as .Net on Windows Azure,” said Senior Vice President of Microsoft;s Server and Cloud Division Amitabh Srivastava.Inside the nearer term, Microsoft will be continuing to flesh out the existing Java interoperability support that the provider already is delivering via new versions of Java software-development kits (SDKs) for Azure.On October 29, Microsoft and Soyatec — its development partner for several of these SDKs — unveiled new Version 2 releases of the Windows Azure SDK for Java and Windows Azure Equipment for Eclipse.
New in the v2 of the Azure SDK for Java is assistance for new features that Microsoft delivered in its Windows Azure SDK 1.2, which shipped in June of this year. Among those new features are refactoring assistance, assistance for Windows Azure Drive, Windows Azure Service Management and Blob snapshot support. New in the v2 of the Azure Resources for Eclipse is assistance for the same Windows Azure SDK 1.2 released in June. Among the new specific new fetures are things like the capacity to host PHP applications on HTTP endpoints using SSL certificates, support for Windows Azure diagnostics, and the capability to run MySQL databases on Windows Azure.