PHP On Windows - Summary
PHP On Windows - Summary
Last week I attended in Guy Burstein lecture about PHP On Windows, you may ask what the relation between Me (Team System) and PHP?
In the past I was a PHP developer so a small part of me was curious to hear what new for PHP developers under Windows.
I came to this lecture with just one question –
Why?
As you know PHP on windows is not new, using ISAPI you can install PHP on IIS but still the question remains - Way?
- Even when using ISAPI PHP will not work on windows like he works on Apache (A lot performance problems).
- Money… Windows cost money…..
- Visual Studio is not so PHP friendly.
In spite of all this, Guy Burstein always has good answers and off course good performance, so here is 4 Big Reasons Why, I’ve learned from Guy’s lecture.
Reason 1: FastCGI = Very Fast
The IIS FastCGI component enables popular application frameworks like PHP be hosted on the IIS web server in a high-performance and reliable way.
FastCGI helps these application frameworks to achieve improved performance on Windows over CGI, while allowing stable operation in production environments
Getting started with IIS and PHP
Community PHP for Windows at PHP.net
The Open Source Community at Microsoft
The Microsoft Web Platform Installer 2.0 (Web PI) is a free tool that makes getting the latest components of the Microsoft Web Platform, including Internet Information Services (IIS), SQL Server Express, .NET Framework and Visual Web Developer easy. The Web PI also makes it easy to install and run the most popular free web applications for blogging, content management and more with the built-in Windows Web Application Gallery.
Installing Web Apps or updating the Microsoft Web Platform, Web PI’s improved validation support ensures everything just works.
Using Web Platform Installer you can install PHP application on Windows without any need to do manual configuration just selecting the desire PHP application you want to install and Web Platform Installer will do the rest.
I choose to install Joomla on Windows and then I got all the Dependencies required for installing Joomla on my system.
All you need to do is to Accept Web Platform Installer to install those components for you.
But this is not all – also the configurations are made during the setup, not need to modify and configuration files.
Below you can see MySql and Site configuration:
And after couple of minutes you are done!
Reason 3: Expression Web 3
Open and edit PHP pages directly in Expression Web 3 and apply the full range of standards-based design tools to PHP. Open and edit PHP pages directly in Expression Web 2 and apply the full range of standards-based design tools to PHP including code-coloring, snippets and IntelliSense™. It also ships with a PHP development server that lets you test your PHP pages without any other external web server dependencies
PHP IntelliSense -
Visual Diagnostics
Debug your pages in multiple browsers on the same machine that you use for development with SuperPreview. And Snapshot Preview provides a high-fidelity browser preview that updates live as you edit your code, saving you the time and effort of loading the page in a browser for each code change. The CSS properties palette visually displays the CSS cascade, enabling you to quickly see all of the styles that the current selection in your web page uses, the order of precedence of those styles, and all of the properties and values of those styles.
Another cool feature is Overlay Layout, shows both previews together so you can see the difference between those browsers.
Below is the CSS size you can take a fix in your code.
Reason 4 – Visibility, support and software for professional Web Developers and Designers - at no upfront cost!!!
Does your company have 10 or fewer employees?
Join WebSiteSpark program with A one-time $100 Program Offering Fee is due upon exit or at the end of the 3 year term.
Program Benefits 
WebSiteSpark provides access to a technology offering for development and production hosting of websites. Once enrolled, you can download the following software from Microsoft:
- For design, development, testing and demonstration of new websites – for a total of up to three users per Web design and development company:
- Visual Studio Professional
- Expression Studio 3 (1 user) and Expression Web 3 (up to 2 users)
- Windows Web Server 2008 R2
- SQL Server 2008 Web Edition
- For production use – that is, to deploy and host new websites developed using Program software – using a total of up to four processors per Web design and development company, of the following (physical or virtual) dedicated servers:
- Windows Web Server 2008 R2
- SQL Server 2008 Web Edition
In addition to software, Microsoft
WebsiteSpark offers Web development and design companies the opportunity to:
- Get Business Opportunities: Get opportunities to expand your customer base and drive new business through showcasing your capabilities and connecting with partners, by featuring your talents in Microsoft marketing and business networking vehicles.
- Get Support and Training - benefits include:
- 2 professional support incidents
- Free online training Managed newsgroups on MSDN (a community of over six million developers) and other Microsoft online properties
- Access to broad community support through connections with Network Partners, Hosting Partners and peers with complementary services and technologies
For more information please visit Guy Burstein's Blog.
Thanks