14 DAY TRIAL // Microsoft announced a new initiative designed to take Internet passwords to the next level, via a strategic collaboration with Zend Technologies. The Zend/PHP Conference and Expo (ZendCon) was the stage where the Redmond company announced that it was expanding the interoperability partnership with Zend, focusing on the web identity metasystem, essentially delivering support for information cards for PHP developers. According to Microsoft, the move will serve to enable advanced control on the side of the users for their personal information. Protecting sensitive data during online transactions will generate improved trustworthiness in scenarios involving online interactions.
"With today's announcement, Microsoft and Zend are making a commitment to deliver information card support to PHP developers, which will reduce development costs and help make the Web safer and more secure for people," said Vijay Rajagopalan, principal architect for Platform & Interoperability Strategy at Microsoft. "Customers have asked Microsoft to take the lead in enabling this interoperability, and today's news demonstrates how we're doing that."
"Enabling information card support in Zend Framework allows developers to make it easy for users of their Web sites to use Windows CardSpace and other solutions to identify themselves without remembering myriad usernames and passwords, providing them with not just greater convenience, but a much more secure way to do so as well," said Robert Richards, PHP extensions contributor and author of "Pro PHP XML and Web Services." "Zend and Microsoft deliver an important benefit to the PHP community by driving standards adoption on important issues such as these."
A component created for the Zend Framework will permit PHP developers to enable support for information cards. As a direct consequence, websites will feature a specific security policy connected with information cards in the possession of only trusted sources. Microsoft informed that the component can be deployed both as a stand-alone item or as an aspect of the framework.
In the end, PHP-enabled Web sites will be able to offer users control over their digital identities and a streamlined authentication process. "Web sites developed on ASP.NET can already accept information cards," Rajagopalan explained. "With this work, a Java-based Web site, for example, built on the Sun Java System Web Server, Apache Tomcat or IBM WebSphere Application Server can now accept a digital information card for security-enhanced identity. A Web site built on Ruby on Rails can accept an information card. There is also an open source information card library project implemented in C, developed by Ping Identity Corp."