Microsoft's most recent Web-driven database technology is ADO.NET, although only the first three letters of its name have been a throwback to its predecessor: There's nothing "ActiveX" about ADO.NET whatsoever. Up to now, its purpose has been to expose data through HTTP Web services that can be utilized by JavaScript clients (read: common Web pages) as well as by .NET applications including Silverlight.

But that fact has kept the pairings of ADO.NET with ASP.NET, and PHP with MySQL, separate and distinct from one another.

So with PHP being the more popular language, known to and practiced by an estimated 9.4% of the world's developers -- making it the #4 language in the world behind Java, C, and C++, according to standards group TIOBE -- that pairing works against Microsoft, and keeps MySQL in the driver's seat for as long as Oracle wants to keep it there.

This time around, Microsoft has decided its way out of that tangle is to let others solve the problem, and then to endorse (and, when warranted, to fund) the result. An independent, Pune, India-based firm called Persistent Systems, Ltd. Has spearheaded an open-source project to develop a kind of command-line re-interpreter, whose purpose is to make ADO.NET data accessible through PHP. It's called PHP Toolkit for ADO.NET Data Services, and its setup is deceptively simple. ADO.NET already generates XML code in Atom format that specifies the formats of Web-addressable resources.

At design time, the PHP Toolkit re-interprets this schema and produces a series of proxy classes, which the Web developers then explicitly includes in his PHP code. The classes behave like objects, with members pointed to like columns in tables.

So for instance, in classic fashion, you can create a loop clause that iterates through each member of a table, and then prints (or, more accurately, echo-es) the contents of members of that table into slots in the PHP code. The XHTML produced for the client contains those contents. It's all done with very minimal adjustments in the way PHP would normally handle tables; all it really needs is to include the proxy classes generated by the Toolkit, using the keywords require_once and define.

ADO.NET Data Services is supported by Service Pack 1 of Microsoft Visual Studio 2008 as well as by the latest Expression Web 3, and will be a key component of Visual Studio 2010.