Microsoft wants to improve PHP’s performance on Windows Internet Information Server (IIS). Andi Gutmans, Zend co-founder says that Zend will optimize PHP for Windows operation. The company has a technology preview of Zend Core for Windows.
PHP has been talking to Windows through a POSIX layer. Now this layer will be removed and PHP will use the Windows API directly to make PHP a first-class citizen on the Windows platform.
Windows with Apache, WAMP, has been a popular platform for PHP development, even though the preferred production platform has always been the LAMP stack. PHP has had trouble with the Apache 2.0″. With Windows giving it a special treatment we might get pulled on the Window stack with IIS for which they are planning a FastCGI module. Or will it be WISP? I would think that Microsoft would promote SQL Server over MySQL.
Anyhow, it is a welcome feature from Microsoft. They are making efforts to ease the open source development on Windows. Earlier they had also hired John Lam who created the RubyCLR bridge.
November 3rd, 2006 at 8:40 am
[...] Isn’t it a world of surprises! Microsoft now has a pact with Novell to make their products work better with each other. I have not understood it entirely and I am not sure whether it is good or not. The phrases with patents sound an alarm, and it is quite possible that this will pose the Linux community against Novell. Earlier Microsoft has shows interest in open source. Hopefully it works for Microsoft, Novell and the user. [...]