Microsoft’s move to bolster server services – PHP support

Not much has been made of an announcement from Zend Technologies and Microsoft this week to add built-in support in Microsoft’s Internet Information Services (IIS) for PHP. This move will enable many more people using PHP to power their websites to easily use IIS rather than the default standard Apache Web Server.

Support in IIS for PHP will be through a new technology called FastCGI; which is already completed, that allows the web server to reuse exisiting PHP processes rather than starting a new one everytime a page is called. The article goes on to say among other things:

Other facets of the collaboration involve technical improvements for PHP on Windows Server, which will be submitted under a PHP license to the PHP community for feedback. Zend will establish a Windows testing lab to maintain high performance of PHP on Windows Server.

The two companies also plan to work to ensure a production-quality PHP runtime environment for IIS 6.0 for Windows Server 2004, and for IIS 7.0 on Longhorn. Both vendors will participate in the PHP community to help developers planning to deploy PHP applications on Windows Server.

There has been more than a few pages that have provided information on ways to get PHP to work on IIS the fact that Microsoft wants to make it a native part of IIS can only be a good thing and very smart business move on their behalf.

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