Chris Risner has posted the first part of his series looking at mobile geolocation in PHP-based Azure applications as hosted on the Windows Azure service.

The first article in this mini-series on creating geolocation apps with the backend hosted in Windows Azure Websites is going to be a walkthrough of the PHP code that we’ll host in Windows Azure. The PHP site will be simple and expose just a few methods. Prior to getting into the code for the service, we need to setup a new website in Windows Azure and set up our database.

He walks you through some of the initial steps to create the PHP side of things - setting up the website instance and database, downloading the Silex PHP framework and the PHP code to get process the latitude and longitude of the current user. Also included is code to help find "interesting" points near the user and code to allow the user to add their own.