I gave a talk today at the Raleigh Code Camp titled “PHP On Windows”. It was decently attended, given the attendee focus at a Microsoft-sponsored event. MS has been embracing PHP much more publicly over the last year or so, and I reviewed some of the steps they’ve been taking (auto-install on IIS7, recent bytecode cache from MS, etc). The slides I used were relatively sparse, as some of the presentation was simply doing some code on Windows.
I will probably expand on this talk and may give it again at some point. If you have any good resources or info about PHP on Windows, let me know.
Typo: Netbeans has had PHP support since 6.5.
Hi Michael,
Very nice presentation. I’m about to give a couple of presentations in front of similar audiences so I found it quite useful to see your way of introducing Windows people into PHP.
A couple of things I’d add to slide 8:
As far as the historical problems in PHP – stability wise, PHP suffered quite a bit, especially for those using mod_php or the ISAPI module. The alternative – CGI – came with the price tag of unreasonably horrible performance.
On the solution side (the work done to improve PHP on Windows) – much of it had to do with the introduction two additional things:
- FastCGI support for IIS (that enabled running with CGI-level stability and roughly server-module performance)
- Re-enabling the possibility to build PHP on Windows without thread safety – that wasn’t really necessary any longer, and was a serious drag on performance.
By the way – you can actually use CE (and the full Zend Server) on IIS as well. It works under both Apache and IIS.
Thanks for sharing!
Zeev
The slides were/are pretty sparse, and I did touch on some of your points in a bit more detail while talking. Some of the audience seemed impressed that CE would integrate with IIS or install Apache – they liked the inclusiveness.
Thanks for replying!
Oh, one other piece of feedback I got from a couple (including a Microsoft employee) – they wanted to see more live coding. I was doing some quick code examples at the end, and they were asking questions about PPP, magic methods, code complete in Zend Studio, and some other ‘hands on’ stuff that doesn’t always get touched on in intro presentations. Honestly, if I’d known that, I’d have slated another 10 minutes in the presentation to cover those ‘advanced’ things. Really, it’s not advanced concepts to most developers, but the syntax differences are enough (and the object model slightly different enough) that they were hungry for the ‘nuts and bolts’ stuff.
I’d like to add on to this presentation and do it again. If there are any .Net user groups reading this that would like me to come present, I’d be happy to
I’m organizing a PHP track for the next SoCal Code Camp that is meeting at Cal State Fullerton University the weekend of Jan 30-31, 2010. People who present do so without receiving any remuneration. If you’re interested in speaking about PHP on Windows, here’s a link if you’d like to sign up to speak:
http://www.socalcodecamp.com/
Thank you for the invitation. However, I’m planning to be presenting that weekend already. I do hope you have a good camp!