Being a PHP programmer, and having seen this article popping up in my daily feeds for about a week, I thought I’d be yet another person to mention it.

In an effort to extend its support for dynamic and scripting languages, Microsoft is hosting a project on CodePlex, its open-source community-development site, to compile the PHP language for the .NET framework.

The project is called Phalanger, it hit version 2.0 beta 2 on July 30th.

It’s licensed under the Microsoft Shared Source Permissive License, and it’s primary goal is to enable full functionality of existing PHP scripts on .NET without any modification, according to Microsoft. Unlike the original PHP interpreter , Phalanger compiles PHP into MSIL(Microsoft Intermediate Language).

The object model for the project is PHP 5.0 and lets developers combine PHP objects and objects in .NET. Developers can use a class written in PHP from a .NET application or import a .NET class into a PHP script. Running the compiled binaries should be more efficient than interpreted source code, which should give the code better performance.

Not only that, but the .NET framework offers a secure environment and interoperability with other code running on the Microsoft Common Language Runtime, said Microsoft.

This isn’t the only dynamic language compiler being worked on at CodePlex. IronPython, created by Jim Hugunin, which implements Python on .NET frame work is being hosted there as well.

Oh, and in case you were wondering, a phalanger is a small, possum-like, long-tailed marsupial from Australia.

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1. Microsoft’s Top 25 Open Source Projects
2. Microsoft Could Be Softer on FLOSS?
3. How to Run IE in Linux (If You Really Have To)
4. Bungie Leaves Microsoft
5. Microsoft: Vista will be deployed quickly!

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