PHP on IIS -> fast and supported

Jesse and I went to the Microsoft Web Developer Summit a few weeks ago representing Gallery. Microsoft promised us that they were trying to be better citizens in the PHP community and make PHP work better on Windows. For those of you not in the know, the common way to run PHP on IIS was through CGI, which means that every single visit to a PHP page requires loading the entire PHP stack. Think starting up your web browser from scratch every time you open a new URL, and multiply that slowness by a few thousand users... it's baaaad. To get around this for PHP (and other CGI scripts) FastCGI came along and made everyones servers perform better. It daemonizes PHP (or anything else supported) so that it doesn't need to start up for every request, but it's never worked quiiiite right on IIS and has never been supported. Until now. So today, after working with Zend for a while, Microsoft has released FastCGI today for the current version of IIS, with full Microsoft Support. Have a PHP app that you are trying to get to work in IIS? They'll help you. Cool! You can download FastCGI for free from www.iis.net/php. (And from what I understand, it really is FastCGI so you can use it for any CGI based application server in IIS.) Have a Windows server running IIS? Want to use Gallery? Check out the howto that Microsoft wrote on Installing Gallery 2 on IIS. In addition to writing some docs, over the next few months Microsoft will supposedly be getting us resources like virtual machines, licenses, hosted test environments, etc so that we can make Gallery work on a wider range of Microsoft products. A little Kool-Aid is definitely good every now and then.

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