Microsoft has announced support for Ruby on Rails running on the Windows Azure cloud platform.

At its Professional Developers Conference, Microsoft played up Windows Azure's capacity to support a variety of different languages and development frameworks. The company also touted its increasing support for open-source technologies running on or integrating with Microsoft platform technology. Now the software giant has introduced support for RoR on Windows Azure.

In a blog post on the issue, Simon Davies, a Microsoft engineer, said: "One of the questions I've heard from a number of customers and partners over the last few months has been, 'Is it possible to run Ruby on Rails on Windows Azure?' Well, the answer is now yes. Using these new features and the approach used in the solution accelerators I have Ruby on Rails running at http://rubyonrails.cloudapp.net. There is also an incredibly simple test application running with a SQLite database at http://rubyonrails.cloudapp.net/posts."

Windows Azure supports Microsoft's .NET languages, such as C#, as well as Java, PHP, Python and Ruby. Now the platform features support for RoR and other open-source technologies.

Said Davies:

"Last week we announced the availability of some great new Windows Azure features in the November Windows Azure SDK. One of these features enables Worker Roles to receive network traffic from both external and internal endpoints using HTTP, HTTPS and TCP. This new feature enables many new scenarios, one of then is the ability to run existing applications that receive traffic over sockets in Windows Azure."

And, Davies said, "Using these capabilities as a foundation we have shown the ability to run various applications and technologies such as MySQL, MediaWiki, Memcached and Tomcat."