Could I use Microsoft AppFabric Caching for communication between PHP and ASP.NET

Question

We have the following setup:

-Windows 2008 R2 Standard.

-ASP.NET Web Application deployed on Microsoft IIS 7.5 Web Server.

-PHP Version 5.4.21 Non Threaded 32-bit version

-WISP (Windows, IIS, SQL Server/Express, and PHP) stack and an ASP.NET web application HTTPS ( SSL )

We will ultimately deploy an ASP.NET Web Application and a PHP Web Application on the Same IIS Server.

User will first log on to the ASP.NET Web Application, but we want the user to be able to navigate between the ASP.NET Web Application and the PHP Web Application back and forth with ease.

We were planning on using a Distributed Cache technology to share session information between the ASP.NET Web Application and the PHP Web Application.

Could I use Microsoft AppFabric Caching for communication between PHP and ASP.NET? Will Microsoft AppFabric Caching work with PHP? If yes, how well does Microsoft AppFabric Caching work with PHP?

Answer 1

I would say your best bet is to write some sort of standards compliant wrapper around your cache API. Something like a REST service that works equally well in PHP and ASP.NET.

So in that solution you would have :

• ASP.NET Web Application
• ASP.NET Hosted Web API -or- ASP.NET Hosted WCF webHttpBinding
• PHP Hosted Web Application

Your two web applications should then share serialized JSON or XML objects through the REST service.