One for the History Books

If you were to look at PlanetPHP right now, you would notice that the five most recent articles posted are about the same thing: the FastCGI extension by Microsoft for their IIS web server. Finally, PHP developers who develop for the Windows platform can have a reliable, production-ready home for their code. Previously, the only way to get PHP to run under IIS was to run PHP as a binary. This single-threaded approach was a serious performance bottleneck for Windows-based PHP applications for many years. Now those days are gone…

So what is one to make of this? Has Microsoft given up on their own server-side language? Hardly. But they certainly have made a noticeable effort to improve their relationship with PHP developers.

Just a few days ago, the MS Web Developers Summit took place. Here, Microsoft invited some of the most prominent PHP developers in our community out for a few days in hopes to reach out and create open relationships with developers of other platforms.

They didn’t stop there either…

A few days before the Summit buzz, people were blogging about Microsoft’s first-ever PHP extension for their MSSQL Server. Apparently, the previous extension was almost completely unusable.

One year before that, I made a post briefly mentioning Zend and Microsoft working together to create a better environment for PHP to run under on Windows. We are now beginning to see the true results of their combined efforts.

Folks, things are changing. We can now see that two very different and competitive companies, with two very different visions, can not only co-exist in the same industry, but can also work together to improve their platforms for their developers. Being entirely a LAMP devloper, I can’t say that I have much practical PHP + Windows experience. I’m curious if anyone from the group has any? This would make for a fantastic presentation or discussion if anyone is interested.

One Response to “One for the History Books”

  1. Damien McKenna Says:

    There have always been two ways to run PHP on IIS - as a CGI or an ISAPI module, the latter of which works just like the apache equivalent. The FastCGI system introduces a third option. Why you’d want to use FastCGI over ISAPI I don’t know, but at least those that do have an option.

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