Paul Skinner

Rock Out with PHP on Windows! (Track 3)
Today’s application developers have an incredible variety of technologies that allow them to create rocking web solutions. While that variety provides choice which is a very powerful tool in of itself, the complexities that arise from choice make it difficult to pick the right technology to implement a web solution. PHP is one of the most popular technologies to implement web applications. Up until recently, Windows was not a good platform choice for hosting PHP web applications for a variety of reasons. With the advent of the FastCGI component for IIS7 and PHP development tools by Microsoft, Windows has become a veritable stage for PHP developers to build applications that “go to eleven”.

Join us in the PHP on Windows track for a rocking series of sessions that will provide you with an overview of the benefits the Windows Server 2008 platform for PHP solutions, how to build PHP web applications on Windows and how to build user interfaces for PHP applications that pop using Microsoft developer and designer tools.

I am standing here beside myself.

Microsoft has actually acknowledged PHP?!? See Technical Tracks here for more info.

- P

P.S. This whole thing smacks as though Ballmer himself “rocked” his P.R. prowess all over it.

Looking over the referrer stats, it seems that many people reach this blog through Google searches more or less aligned with “How do I install PHP on IIS?”. I think XAMPP might be a better, and easier answer for many about to embark on a frustrating journey.

I can appreciate the need to install PHP under IIS for some purposes. For instance you need your application to co-exist in an environment where you are subject to the existing infrastructure, ranging to the more rudimentary “It’s what the client wants” concerns.

For the most part, I think we can all agree that few, if any visitors to this page would actually be building a web server to be deploy in a data-centre for production/mission critical purposes. I’d hazard that the vast majority of these visits are more interested in learning about PHP, dealing with configuration mysteries or just want a sane development environment in which to code, debug and test.

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One of my first blog posts, PHP Installation: A myriad of options asserted that Windows and PHP 4 in ISAPI mode was a frustrating affair. I hereby offer a partial retraction in this regard as PHP 5 is MUCH different.

The folks at PHP recently announced the retirement of the 4.x version slated for December 2007. After which PHP 4 will continue to receive critical updates until August 2008. If you still run PHP 4, now is the time to starting thinking about getting everything up to version 5.

With that in mind, we’ve decided to upgrade all our development environments to PHP 5. Our standard development machines aren’t really all that fancy; 2 year old Dell P4 H/T based desktops running XP. Being a small group of developers, we’re liberal with the choice of IDE; some use PHPEdit, while I’m drawn between Zend IDE and Eclipse.

Our previous run-ins with PHP4 in ISAPI mode were not good. While PHP would usually run to some extent, we were often faced with segfault error message at the top of the output and often IIS would space out. Yes, we’d followed the lengthy install read-me on the site and still could not get PHP and IIS to play nicely. We pretty much gave up on PHP in ISAPI under IIS and settled with PHP in CGI mode for development purposes.

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