Microsoft and PHP

NOTICE: This blog entry was imported from our previous blogging platform.
The real entry date is October 21, 2009

Last night I tried something called "Windows Cache Extension for PHP". In the world of PHP, accelerators are extensions which cache script opcodes in either the file system or memory so that the next time the script is requested, it won't need to be checked, parsed and converted into opcodes. Accelerators significantly increase response times, especially in large PHP applications and libraries (such as our PHP framework, WebCore 3x). So far I had been using eAccelerator fairly successfully. The problem with eAccelerator is that sometimes it will make Apache crash for no apparent reason. Well, Microsoft just realeased their own PHP accelerator extension and guess what? It works amazingly well. I'm testing the extension with IIS 6.0 + FastCGI + PHP 5.2.10 and so far, in terms of speed and reliability, I am very happy with it. This is the third time I've been surprised by Microsoft's work towards integrating with PHP. The first time I saw this, was when I discovered they were offering a SQL Server Driver (extension) for PHP. Then, Microsoft integrated PHP within their free Web Platforms Installer. This made it very simple to install PHP on IIS 6 or 7 and bundle it wih FastCGI. Finally, and most amazingly, thier new Windows Cache Extension for PHP really shows some interest from Microsoft to winning a large PHP user base over to IIS. I can't wait until Microsoft goes beyond the Phalanger project and creates a PHP compiler for the .NET framework as they did with Ruby and Python. I guess that with the DLR and the new "dynamic" C# 4.0 keyword, we will be seeing support for PHP.NET soon enough.