Based on some of the responses to his previous open letter to the PHP-FIG (Framework Interoperability Group), Anthony Ferrara has posted a follow-up explaining some of his points made and the caching proposal in a bit more detail.

A few days ago, I wrote An Open Letter to PHP-FIG. Largely the feedback on it was positive, but not all. So I feel like I do have a few more things to say. What follows is a collection of followups to specific points of contention raised about my post. I'm going to ignore the politics and any non-technical discussion here.

He points out that while the previous post wasn't completely about the cache proposal (it was used as a "literary device") there was some confusion on it. He walks through the "unnecessary complexity" he sees with it, citing code examples, and makes points about performance, memory usage handling stampede protection and the creation of standard ways to avoid it. He ends the post with a look at group invalidation handling and two ways it could be accomplished, either via namespacing or through tagging the items and using that as a reference point for the invalidation.

In a quick new post to his blog today Brian Swan shows you how to find a drive letter in Azure through PHP (for a Windows Azure Drive).

Today, I’ll start by taking a look at Windows Azure Drives. Specifically, I’ll explain how to programmatically determine the driver letter for a Windows Azure Drive. (I’ll assume you’ve read the getting started post I wrote a couple of weeks ago.) Simply put, a Windows Azure drive acts as a local NTFS volume that is mounted on the server’s file system and that is accessible to code running in a role. The data written to a Windows Azure drive is stored in a page blob defined within the Windows Azure Blob service, and cached on the local file system.

He shows how he's set up his instance with two drives and how, with a bit of PHP code, he could grab the value from the "X_DRIVES" environment variable, split it out and loop to find the drive you're looking for. His example code puts a simple text file on the drive and then reads it back out.