Tuesday, 10 April 2007

Overview of Microsoft's PHP Initiative

Microsoft has released the second technical preview of FastCGI for IIS, a new component for Microsoft’s Web server platform. Justin Silverton in a post over his blog explains the concept. He says, FastCGI component is part of the collaboration between Microsoft and Zend to improve performance and stability of PHP on the Windows platform. This effort aims to help PHP developers to achieve improved performance on the Windows platform by leveraging the new IIS FastCGI feature together with Zend’s on-going work to improve the PHP engine on Windows.

He lists the new features of IIS 7 as follows:

• The IIS7 output cache is a new feature in IIS7, which will make it possible to cache script responses in memory (including dynamic content). It is much smarter than the current caching system IIS offers because it can be configured to cache different copies of responses for the same page based on a query string value
• Another interesting feature is kernel mode driver caching, allowing for very fast and improved performance. It will work with any content type, and can significantly speed up performance for applications where the underlying data doesn’t change.