Microsoft Partners With Zend

jesse.castro writes to point out news of Microsoft striking a multi-year partnership with PHP provider Zend to improve PHP's performance on Windows-based Web servers. From the article: "Rather than marking a sudden change of course, Microsoft is openly engaging in a dialogue with Zend, a key open source promoter, and millions of PHP developers, analysts said."

Comments

Just more shit on the pile

[Anonymous Crowhead]

Ugh.

Hooray for Microsoft Zend 2007, Ultimate Edition!

[Anonymous Coward]

Pulling Zend off my Apache box now. Embrace, Extend, Extinguish isn't going to get me this time.

-evilghost

Seems that

[hairypalmer]

Jani was right, Zend are part of the zionist conspiracy.

On a more serious note, nothing good will come of this!

Re:Seems that

[gmack]

Plenty good will come of this. With an improved PHP it's now easier for ASP shops to migrate to PHP. It's now possible for a slow migration instead of having to change everything over at once. I've had several potential clients come to me with exactly this problem "we want to move to PHP but we don't want to run 2 servers".

The funny thing is that even with the current speed penalty PHP has become the second most popular web programming language on windows servers.

Re:Seems that

[cheater512]

'Improved' is a interesting word huh?

It's a trap ?

[pembo13]

One would think MS has enough languages of their own. None of which I personally like.

Re:It's a trap ?

[chroot_james]

Don't be silly. They want to make sure that anything where Linux as an alternative is better becomes not better. They're done fighting everyone and are embracing the democratization of innovation and personal preference. The uses of PHP or ASP don't have to be rational for them to make money selling windows server that run both...

Re:It's a trap ?

[CastrTroy]

I personally have to say that I love VB.Net and C#. They are great languages. Now, IIS I have some issues with, but I find it a joy to work in Visual Studio with C# and VB.Net. Certainly better than working in PHP, with any IDE i've tried. I haven't tried Zen yet though. I've been searching for a good IDE. Does anybody have suggestions for a good PHP IDE? I'm currently using Quanta.

Re:It's a trap ?

[Anonymous Coward]

One would think MS has enough languages of their own.

Not at all, now they have introduced another innovative language: php#

Embrace, extend, extinguish!

Re:It's a trap ?

[gmack]

You mean like Zend studio?

Re:It's a trap ?

[Anonymous Coward]

Zend Studio is a very nice IDE to use with PHP. It's supported on multiple platforms, can run with remote servers and (for IE under Windows at least) has a nifty toolbar you can add for when you need to quickly switch on and off (if, say, you need to make a few clicks/page loads before you get to the part in your application that you actually need to debug). It's got all the usual stuff you'd expect in an IDE and works pretty well. I believe it's still a Java application though (the client side that is) so you won't want to run the client on a wimpy machine, though my 1GHz Athlon w/ 512MB RAM runs it just fine. It's not all that expensive either, all things considered.

Re:It's a trap ?

[Shawn is an Asshole]

There is an excellent IDE for PHP. It's called PHP Eclipse, which is a plug in for Eclipse.

Re:It's a trap ?

[CastrTroy]

I'm looking for something with good code completion and debugging. Do you know how well those features are compared to the equivalent features in Visual Studio?

Re:It's a trap ?

[Achromatic1978]

A few people have mentioned Zend Studio, but I find it sluggish. My vote goes to ActiveState's Komodo.

Re:It's a trap ?

[Alternate Interior]

There's a product called VS PHP. I've never tried it, but since it claims to plug into VS, I'd assume it allows anything VS does. But I don't know that for a fact.

Re:It's a trap ?

[Alternate Interior]

Sorry -- that has a wrong link. Try http://www.jcxsoftware.com/vs.php .

Re:It's a trap ?

[AVryhof]

On windows, I use dev-php... on Linux, I use Kate.

Re:It's a trap ?

[bryxal]

As a PHP only developer for a few years now I was with all the Free IDE and then the ZEND proffesional but the Best one and the one i am currently on is NuSphere PhpEd. the cost is high but the debug and the profilign and the IDE for all languages(CSS, JS etc) well integrated is beyond any other one. Also the Zend one runs very slowly. while NuSphere is incredibly Faster

Re:It's a trap ?

[HvitRavn]

Combine PHP Eclipse with Subclipse and Eclipse SQL Explorer (and maybe even Azzurri Clay), and you're ready for any serious PHP project. I've used alot of PHP editors and IDE's, and PHP Eclipse beats them all by far - including Zend Studio. With Sun Java available on ubuntu, it's a breeze to use on a GNU/Linux setup as well.

Re:It's a trap ?

[Nushio]

I used to use Notepad.

I didnt know of any other alternatives at the time :P

Re:It's a trap ?

[cheater512]

I agree with you completely.

Next they will be selling Windows 2007 Server using the Linux kernel.

Re:It's a trap ?

[tacocat]

yer a nut!

If what you say is indeed true then this is the first time in some 20+ years that Microsoft is changing from Embrace/Extend/Extinguish to... Sorry, I don't believe it. There is not one company to have survived a partnership with Microsoft. In five years, if Zend is still Zend and PHP is still PHP and not some dot-net extension, you might have a point.

I view this as the end of Zend and the kiss of death to PHP. If PHP gets better under Windows then it will probably somehow get worse under Linux. Will that make people stop using Linux and switch to Windows? Don't bet on it...

Re:It's a trap ?

[Juan C. Rivera]

Give VS.Php a try. It works with the Visual Studio 2005 IDE. For those who don't own Visual Studio 2005, there is a standalone edition as well. The standalone edition comes with the basic Visual Studio IDE components.

Jcx.Software signed up a deal with Microsoft earlier in the year to distribute Visual Studio with our product. This was a big change for Microsoft which only allowed 3rd party companies to develop Visual Studio plug-ins that generated code that only run on Windows.

In any case, with VS.Php you can do some pretty cool stuff like debugging Javascript and Php on the same session. Also if you can debug Php C modules and Php scripts in the same debug session as well.

Another cool feature of VS.Php is that it comes loaded with everything you need to start developing and debugging Php applications. It has it's own Apache web server as well as Php4 and Php5 runtimes.

Check out various screencasts here.

Re:It's a trap ?

[justinchudgar]

http://www.jcxsoftware.com/jcx/vsphp/home is a PHP plugin for Visual Studio. I used it briefly before switching to ubuntu eclipse and phpeclipse.

Re:It's a trap ?

[gbjbaanb]

So what - isn't this what open source is supposed to be about. If MS wants to embrace/extend/extinguish (otherwise known as forking) then that's fine, the GPL allows them to do so. why would you have a problem with PHP.net under a F/OSS licence.

If it makes PHP better under windows, and adds support for PHP to tools like Visual Studio then all is good. The old PHP will continue to work as before.

Re:It's a trap ?

[FST777]

PHP isn't licensed under the GPL. The PHP License allows binary distribution of deriatives, provided some conditions are met. Think of it as an extended BSD license. No F/OSS PHP.net there, unless Microsoft specifically chooses so (unlikely).

If Zend dies because of this, PHP will suffer a great blow. I'm sure it will survive, but continue to work as before?

Anyway, I think the guys at Zend are on their guard. All I see now is Microsoft wanting to get PHP working with IIS as good as it does with Apache.

Re:It's a trap ?

[gbjbaanb]

I do apologise, I thought it was GPL.

The only problem I can see will be if MS adds features to the language that Linux version doesn't have, and lots of developes start writing MS-PHP code in Visual Studio targetting IIS. However, all that will do is make people ensure that there is a clear distinction of the version of PHP that their code is written for - something that happens already with PHP4 and PHP5.

Re:It's a trap ?

[smartfart]

There is simply no way this can be good for PHP. Microsoft will in some way co-op, patent or otherwise do harm to the project before it's all over with.

In other news, I'm so terribly glad I migrated to Perl recently :-)

Re:It's a trap ?

[Crayon Kid]

I'm looking for something with good code completion and debugging.

Code completion is for pussies. As for debugging, in PHP we do it with echo and error_log(), like the good God intended.

Re:It's a trap ?

[Crayon Kid]

I've never found need for anything more than a text editor with syntax highlighting and the ability to pop-up the relevant manual page when you highlight a function name and press F1. On Windows I have EditPlus and the CHM manual from PHP. On Linux there's Nedit and a macro which opens the HTML page in Firefox. To each his own.

Re:It's a trap ?

[Allador]

Is this any different from what ActiveState did for Perl on Win32?

This is also no different than what MS did with the Mozilla Foundation, bringing some of their devs in for a few days to work with them and help them make FireFox work better on Vista.

This adds choice for the community, which is a good thing.

There are plenty of small and medium companies who have a homogenous windows environment (some of them are also run well and stable). For them, its just better if PHP/Perl/Python/Ruby/etc runs better on windows, as that lets them save money by having a homogenous environment. This in turn lets them focus more on their core business, rather than changing their technology platform.

Re:It's a trap ?

[Anonymous Coward]

You naive fool. I have florida realestate to sell you, or perhaps amazing investment opportunities in many Bridges in New York. PHP is dead man walking.......

Re:It's a trap ?

[j-pimp]

The only problem I can see will be if MS adds features to the language that Linux version doesn't have, and lots of developers start writing MS-PHP code in Visual Studio targetting IIS. However, all that will do is make people ensure that there is a clear distinction of the version of PHP that their code is written for - something that happens already with PHP4 and PHP5.

While I do fear PHP extensions, I would actually like to see more PHP development on IIS. If there are more PHP windows developers, there are more people to help port PHP applications to run on IIS. Also, I've personally discovered that coding C# in an IDE (SharpDevelop), has encouraged me to learn about things like code documentation since the IDE holds my hand. When the time came to wrote PHP in VIM again, it was much easier to teach myself the slightly more free form PHP documenter, because I was able to format my DocBlocks in a manner similar to what an IDE did for me. In other words I took off the train wheels.

Re:It's a trap ?

[Anonymous Coward]

How much of a super computer do you need to run it without any wait? Eclipse can be slow as it is written in Java--a modern interpretted language, and yes it is interpretted or do you run java programs without the java program?

YAY

[Anonymous Coward]

And the crowd rejoices!

LAM-P

[Nafai7]

Microsoft started by trying to be best buds with Firefox (web client). Now they seem to be looking at the server side. They are going after the P! Is M (MySQL) next?

Re:LAM-P

[chroot_james]

If they were smart, yes! They need to compete with the new super mega giant Linux rival (Oracle).

Re:LAM-P

[Ant P.]

LAMP works fine with Perl. Or even Python.

That reminds me, I've needed an excuse to learn one of those for a while now...

Re:LAM-P

[El_Muerte_TDS]

Or simply: Linux Apache Middleware (PHP, Perl, Python, Ruby, ...) PostgreSQL

Re:LAM-P

[StarfishOne]

(Disclaimer The following is without trying to start a language X vs. language Y flame-fest:)

Perhaps I'm allowed to recommend Python to you. It's easy and quick to learn in general and personally I noticed that I picked it up much, much faster than Perl. The only thing I have to say is that, when it comes to the fact that whitespace/identation is part of the Python syntax.. dive in with an open mind! There are so many people who are complaining about this feature of Python, but if you are used to given your code a proper layout, you'll stop noticing that you have to ident code blocks quite fast. Then it has become natural and, IMHO, quite pleasant.

Although this might not be a guarantee, the following anecdote is quite telling if you ask me:

One of my friends (experienced PHP/Perl coder) was also complaining about 'whitespace this and whitespace that'.. after a few weeks I convinced him to give him a shot. After an hour the amount of complaining reduced significantly. The next day he proudly showed me a complete IRC bot which he had developed from the ground up! Even though he had a decent amount coding experience, doing this in a new language is quite amazing when thinking about it! :)

Oh, and nowadays he wants to program in Python as much as possible... he's addicted! ;)

Re:LAM-P

[alphamugwump]

What pissed me off about python was the apparent lack of a "for loop". Maybe I haven't looked hard enough, but I can't find the equivalent of the C "for" where you just have an initializer, an ending condition, and an iterator. Yes, I know you can iterate over a range, but that isn't the same at all.

Re:LAM-P

[shmlco]

In most languages if you forget an opening or closing brace the compiler will syntax out. Screw up one tab in Python and everything "seems" to work... until it doesn't.

Re:LAM-P

[rgravina]

Python has a for loop, as you're probably aware e.g:

list = ['a', 'b', 'c']
for item in list:
    print item

will print:

a
b
c

But it doesn't have the C initialisation syntax. That's not necessarily bad, it's just "not C". It's also great to be able to say "for each object in some list" rather than "for each index into the array" - it makes your code cleaner. But you can index into lists of you really want.

More details here (from the book Dive Into Python - it's both free and very good!):
http://www.diveintopython.org/file_handling/for_lo ops.html

Also, you'll find as you get more experienced with python, you will use lists in interesting ways more and more where you would once have used for loops. Not only is this more elegant, but more efficient in python too.

Here's a good example:
http://divmod.org/trac/wiki/PotatoProgramming

And the section on lists from the aforementioned book:
http://www.diveintopython.org/native_data_types/li sts.html

If you still want to use ending conditions however, you can use while statements instead or break out of the loop on some condition. I'm not that experienced a python programmer.. there may be better ways.

beware...the zend of the world is neigh

[JCOTTON]

Oh, forget it. mod down.

Re:beware...the zend of the world is neigh

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes they will be Buddy Buddy with ZEND..
Just like they were with their Old Pals from JAVA.
Until they Bastardize it enough and Steal the Thoughts and Ideas to make Microsoft C#-(insert name here)

Re:No problem. Yet.

[Jaegar]

You left out their favorite phase. Extinguish.

Re:No problem. Yet.

[softcoder]

How long do you give ZEND/PHP before they find out their IP is no longer theirs?

Why are people freaking out?

[moore.dustin]

This is good news as far as I am concerned. Additional support from a major provider of server OS's to a widely used OPEN SOURCE language can and will help. It is not like PHP is only thing out there now and its flaws are more apparent now with the whole web 2.0 and its corresponding languages. Maybe some support and extra innovation will keep it viable and maintain its developers/users. I know I have been looking to other languages more and more as time goes by.

What does this mean for ASP though? Short answer is probably nothing I am guessing, but could this mean something down the road?

Re:Why are people freaking out?

[Lewrker]

Microsoft trying to re-invent the web was never a good thing.

Re:Why are people freaking out?

[oohshiny]

Maybe some support and extra innovation will keep it viable and maintain its developers/users.

If PHP developers wanted "innovation", PHP wouldn't have succeeded as much as it did. PHP has succeeded because it's for people to develop web applications with, and to do so with little more than a text editor. It also doesn't look to me like PHP needs more support (and what kind support would Microsoft offer anyway?).

This is simply what it looks like: Microsoft wants PHP to run better on Windows servers so that people who want to run popular PHP applications aren't forced to switch to Linux in order to get good performance. It's understandable, it's reasonable, and it's not particularly nefarious.

Maybe Microsoft will add a little more support to their development tools for PHP, or maybe not, but I doubt that will make a difference to anybody; people who develop with Microsoft tools probably aren't all that interested in PHP (yes, I know, I'm an insensitive clod because you, gentle reader, happen to be one of those people, but I suspect there aren't so many of you).

Re:Why are people freaking out?

[moore.dustin]

Actually I am not one of those people as I only run Linux on servers I use. Windows had their chance with me and lost me a while back, though maybe this will allow me to at least consider a Windows based system. I do agree though, it is probably just agreement to make PHP play well wtih Windows. Nonetheless, there is nothing bad about that as far as I can see.

Re:Why are people freaking out?

[Fozzyuw]

Hmm... so much PHP hatred. I'm a little surprised here. Although, I cannot disagree with people's claim on how PHP gets used to pump out complete slop by new-to-programming people, what would be the open-source choice if not PHP?

The only other thing I can think of is JSP, which I started working with once, but soon grew a bit frustrated with trying to get it to work on Windows in a "WAMP" environment. I also found that it was just confusing to organize, and this comes from a programmer who spent most of his time in Java in College. Or maybe, I've just grown soft with PHP. What's the recommended server-side langauge by SlashDot readers? I'm looking to start branching out to a new language soon.

Cheers,
Fozzy

Re:Why are people freaking out?

[TheVelvetFlamebait]

Why are people freaking out?

I'll give you two words and two miscellaneous characters: this is /.

Re:Why are people freaking out?

[jZnat]

Most people seem to like either Ruby [on Rails] or Python (Django seems to be a good MVC framework, but there are more).

Re:Why are people freaking out?

[Anonymous Coward]

Ermm...a company whose stated mission is to *destroy open source* is partnering with an open source project.

Why wouldn't people "freak out" ?

Re:Why are people freaking out?

[vmfedor]

Assuming when you say ASP you mean ASP.NET, I don't think there's any competition really. ASP.NET is a competitor of Java, not PHP. Trying to compare PHP and ASP.NET is impossible.

And if you meant regular old ASP, well, don't use that, use PHP. :)

Re:Why are people freaking out?

[tacocat]

Yeah, but PHP isn't all that great when you compare it to mod_perl or rails (different extremes)

Re:Why are people freaking out?

[IntergalacticWalrus]

Why are we freaking out? Apparently you've never heard of something called "embrace and extend".

Re:Why are people freaking out?

[PHPfanboy]

no, most people posting seem to like RoR or Python. User base is something else (much lower by all metrics).

This makes me happy.

[KermodeBear]

As a PHP developer this could be a great boon for me. With Microsoft actively getting involved with PHP, perhaps more companies will consider using it. More jobs opportunities for me - whee! Maybe I can get out of Buffalo...

That said, this confuses me a bit:

Technical improvements by Zend and Microsoft to make it easier to run PHP on Windows[...]

Since when was it difficult to run PHP on Windows? I have written code that runs on both Linux and Windows machines, and, like most scripting languages, "it just works". There are a few extensions (like process control) that don't work under Windows - but the need for those extensions is very small. For a vast majority of scripting you don't need to do anything differently under Linux than you do Windows. I wish the article would have gone more in depth about these alleged problems.

Re:This makes me happy.

[dave420]

It says in the article:

'"PHP has always worked on Windows. The problem is that it never performed very well," Andi Gutmans, Zend's co-founder and chief technology officer, said in an interview'

It seems MS is looking to improve performance, not to get it working in the first place. Any performance gains on any platform is great news for the language.

Re:This makes me happy.

[MBCook]

My gut is telling me that this is just to stop customer hemorrhaging. People say "We like PHP and that's what our code is in so we can't use Windows" or "... but Linux is faster" (just a guess). So MS is helping with PHP so people can either switch FROM Linux to Windows and easily keep/develop PHP, or just get better performance for their current code (if there is a very measurable performance hit from running Windows, they'd want that fixed).

Either way it's good, but that's my guess why they are doing this ("Just switch to ASP.Net, it's great" probably wasn't working well for most shops that already have $$$ invested in PHP code).

Re:This makes me happy.

[GiorgioG]

Hey - don't knock Buffalo - some of are happy with our new Jumping-Slug Sabres logo (http://www.sabres.com/). Really though... You can make plenty of $ in Buffalo (and considering the cost of living here, you'd be a fool to go work in a high-demand area.) Just pick a more in-demand technology...

Re:This makes me happy.

[Anonymous Coward]

Getting php to run smoothly on a windows server can be a bit challenging. We've had numerous issues with intermittent "PHP Access Violation" errors. (It doesn't help that our IT department is staffed by retards)

Re:This makes me happy.

[Noctrnl]

My guess is it's probably to improve the performance. Yeah, you can do it now, but that doesn't mean it's to be done. Could also be implimenting the core of PHP into Windows or it's products without having to go "outside the box" to get the software and install it.

I've got kind of mixed feelings on this myself, but it certainly isn't a bad thing right now. We'll just have to see what road they go down.

Re:This makes me happy.

[allometry]

The quote you have is out of context. They said it's easy to get running, but it doesn't perform very well.

There are improvements to PHP that can be made on Windows. Example, IIS integration.

I'm not saying that it's hard to do, but it's not with the whole "plug and play" mentality that Microsoft has.
Developers shouldn't have to be server administrators too.

Server administrators, often times not programmers, have no clue about PHP and how to get it running. The most
they know about it is that PHP programs end in .php.

Easy of installing PHP under IIS would be a good improvement. It would coincide with this whole "plug-and-play"
mentality Microsoft has and would also take the need off developers to admin servers.

Re:This makes me happy.

[wizbit]

some of are happy with our new Jumping-Slug Sabres logo

I always thought it looked like Barney Rubble's hair, or a furry version of the Chargers logo...

Re:This makes me happy.

[ajs]

This is probably aimed at improving the build environment for PHP on Windows, OS integration (deeper integration with .Net, etc). These things are important to Windows developers, though not as much to PHP developers who don't think in terms of what box the code runs on.

Re:This makes me happy.

[Xibby]

Possibly integrating PHP into the Windows Scripting Host similar to Active Perl. That could be interesting as it would expose PHP to WMI and other resources made available via the Windows Scripting Host.

Re:This makes me happy.

[00lmz]

That already exists (although I don't know how well it works).

Re:This makes me happy.

[Spacejock]

if (!running_on_windows)
{
print "Unsupported operating system detected.";
print "To enjoy the full php experience please visit www.microsoft.com for an upgrade."
}

Re:This makes me happy.

[kestasjk]

This means PHP will run on .NET as an ASP.NET language. As a PHP4 guy with a lot of open source code invested in PHP I'm pretty excited about this too, but I would be surprised to not see at least major API changes, and at most some language changes too.

PHP.NET is long overdue though, kudos MS!

Re:This makes me happy.

[mgblst]

If you know PHP, you can do pretty much anything, Python, asp, C#, coldfusion - they aren't that much different. Once you get the basic, it isn't that hard to move around (coming from someone who has done asp, coldfusion, ASP.NET in the last year for 3 different jobs)

Re:This makes me happy.

[Allador]

I actually dont think it means that, based on TFA.

It reads to me as if they are just working with Zend to make a version of the PHP interpreter that runs will in IIS, and maybe has a multi-threading mode, etc.

Also to improve the speed and reliability.

At least thats my read of it.

Re:This makes me happy.

[jack_csk]

To make it php compatible:

if (!$running_on_windows)
{
print "Unsupported operating system detected.";
print "To enjoy the full php experience please visit www.microsoft.com for an upgrade.";
}

Haskell vs PHP

[Anonymous Coward]

Discuss.

Re:Haskell vs PHP

[Anonymous Coward]

Not worth it...

Re:Haskell vs PHP

[Senzei]

I'm guessing this discussion will not be conducted until we approach the time when someone needs to refer to it.

Re:Haskell vs PHP

[WilliamSChips]

Haskell has much better design.
PHP has...no redeeming features.

Re:Haskell vs PHP

[imbaczek]

Haskell wins by default.

After Visual Basic...

[PHAEDRU5]

php's a logical choice: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PHP#Criticism

Re:After Visual Basic...

[dave420]

What language doesn't have criticism? :)

Re:After Visual Basic...

[Venik]

Microsoft COBOL, naturally.

Re:After Visual Basic...

[Senzei]

"There are only two kinds of languages: the ones people complain about and the ones nobody uses." - Bjarne Stroustrup

Re:After Visual Basic...

[WilliamSChips]

...a man whose forte is making horribly-designed languages.

Re:After Visual Basic...

[RAMMS EIN]

I can't believe the most important misfeatures aren't in there:

1. PHP has weird and impractical variable scoping (you have to explicitly indicate if you want to access a global variable from within a function)

2. The implementation as well as certain language features have been a rich source of vulnerabilities

3. Certain operations crash the interpreter (e.g. doing MySQL operations when mysqld is down)

Just from the top of my head.

Re:After Visual Basic...

[iluvcapra]

This is totally getting into sour territory, but I would add:

1. The primitive types are all silently interchangeable with each other, and a string will often magically turn into an number if you use it in a function that want it to be a number. You have to test a variable for type with a library call if you want to guarantee its type for a particular operation.
2. The designers of the language seem to be confused on the question of 'hashes' and 'arrays' in that they seem to think they are the same thing.
3. Arrays themselves have pointers to their 'current location', which client functions set in their own scope and will return the array to you with it in funny places.

Re:After Visual Basic...

[Anonymous Coward]

php's a logical choice: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PHP#Criticism

Yet:

Host: 66.230.200.100:80

HTTP/1.0 301 Moved Permanently
Date: Wed, 01 Nov 2006 12:57:17 GMT
Server: Apache
X-Powered-By: PHP/5.1.2
Vary: Accept-Encoding,Cookie
Cache-Control: s-maxage=1200, must-revalidate, max-age=0
Last-Modified: Wed, 01 Nov 2006 12:57:17 GMT
Location: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Main_Page
Content-Type: text/html
Age: 6
X-Cache: HIT from sq27.wikimedia.org
X-Cache-Lookup: HIT from sq27.wikimedia.org:80
Via: 1.0 sq27.wikimedia.org:80 (squid/2.6.STABLE4)

Don't you just love irony? Of course Perl and Ruby are flawless turds squeezed directly out of the rectum of God himself.

Worst Case Scenario?

[Anonymous Coward]

I think the biggest concern would be that there would start to be Windows-only features or performance benefits in PHP. If you think about it, Microsoft of course has their own interest in mind, namely selling more Windows Server licenses. If MS can claim that PHP runs better/faster on Windows than on a Linux server, they'll be able to sell more licenses. And would their agreement with Zend hamstring development of PHP on other platforms possibly?

Re:Worst Case Scenario?

[revlayle]

There are already Windows-specific API calls in PHP - has been for several releases now.

yup, php is JUST LIKE visual basic

[rubycodez]

poorly designed, not powerful, and encouraging bad coding practices.

Re:yup, php is JUST LIKE visual basic

[MasterC]

poorly designed, not powerful, and encouraging bad coding practices.

Despite your sarcasm, I would actually have to agree to some degree.

PHP is a hodge-podge of functions that lack much consistency (compare in_array(needle, haystack) with, say, strpos(haystack, needle)) and when coding a real site with classes and such you still have to code within the confines of "we're escaping out of HTML into PHP mode" with the <? and ?> tags in *every* file. This promotes and encourages combining display with logic which many would argue is a bad coding practice.

Then there's the *many* "oh, that's a feature not a bug" like why there's a need for a late static binding patch. I run into these somewhat often and have given up interaction with the developers because they're cranky and refuse to listen to constructive criticism.

As for performance: you can't "compile" them like you can in python to avoid the reparsing time which can be quite extensive if you get up into tens of thousands of lines of code which happens on *every* page load.

IMHO, "aliasing" is the worst thing to happen to PHP because you have to go *out of your way* to pass an object by reference instead of by copy and if you forget an ampresand in one of three places (function argument, function return, or assigment with =&) then PHP silently makes a copy of your object. And in some places it is *impossible* to pass by reference (e.g., the magic methods). Then aliasing has its other side-effects like in foreach loops.

Then there's the lack of a good, free profiler and debugger (granted I haven't looked in a while so please share if you know of some).

That said, I'm not railing against PHP (in fact, it currently pays my bills) but that doesn't mean it doesn't have its negatives and doesn't have areas where improvment is the only way things can go. I hope this parternship has at least some tricklebacks to non-Windows performance.

Re:yup, php is JUST LIKE visual basic

[nuzak]

> IMHO, "aliasing" is the worst thing to happen to PHP because you have to go *out of your way* to pass an object by reference instead of by copy

The whole pass by value thing was what drove me away permanently from PHP years ago, but I thought PHP fixed that behavior in PHP5. Am I mistaken?

Re:yup, php is JUST LIKE visual basic

[VGPowerlord]

As for performance: you can't "compile" them like you can in python to avoid the reparsing time which can be quite extensive if you get up into tens of thousands of lines of code which happens on *every* page load.

I could be wrong, but isn't that what the Alternative PHP Cache (APC) extension is for? There's also Zend Cache, but that's a commercial product.

Zend Optimizer might be related. Although Zend Optimizer is free as in beer, it is not free as in speech, which may turn away open source purists.

As a side note, I've heard that Zend Optimizer and Alternative PHP Cache do not play nice together.

Re:yup, php is JUST LIKE visual basic

[TheVelvetFlamebait]

I personally like visual basic. I especially appreciate it because it was how I, and some others I know, got into programming in the first place. At first, I loved the novelty of dragging and dropping to create forms. Then I marvelled in amazement at how the stuff I write in the "code" section made the program do stuff. Then I found out more and more about slightly more advanced functions and then a few API calls. Suddenly I started to feel the urge to use more lower level and powerful programming languages like Pascal and C++. Now, I'm trying to program for the Gameboy Advance (fun stuff there).

I owe it all to visual basic, and believe me, I'm not ungrateful.

Re:yup, php is JUST LIKE visual basic

[MasterC]

The whole pass by value thing was what drove me away permanently from PHP years ago, but I thought PHP fixed that behavior in PHP5. Am I mistaken?

No, everything still defaults to pass by value. You have to declare your function like "function & foo(& $a)" to pass by reference and return by reference and assign the return value like "$bar =& foo($object);" to make sure $bar is by reference to what foo returns. If you miss any one of those three ampresands then you get pass by value.

This is why PHP's DOM functionality does not rely on a PHP object storing actual data (do a var_dump and you see nothing) because it is *much* easier keeping a single, global registry of the actual data and pass objects will-nilly around that just reference an entry in said global registry.

As repeated time after time by the PHP developers: this is a "feature" not a bug. But if they listened to the masses then it would produce a version not backward compatible and I do not forsee this system ever changing...

Re:yup, php is JUST LIKE visual basic

[metarox]

No, the default PHP5 behavior is all by reference If you want a copy you have to explicitly use the clone operation on the object to get a copy. http://mjtsai.com/blog/2004/07/15/php-5-object-ref erences/

Re:yup, php is JUST LIKE visual basic

[rubycodez]

well, I can say similar thing about Fortran I, but that doesn't mean it was a good language or a great thing to learn first. Wish I had run into LISP earlier than the late 80s.

Cue R.E.M

[geeksdave]

"It's the "Z"end of the world as we know it".... I feel sick...

Re:Cue R.E.M

[Alzdran]

Oh, come on. "It's Z-end of the world as we know it".

Re:forst pist

[Anonymous Coward]

thord pist gynius

I've been doing "WAMP" for years...

[xxxJonBoyxxx]

My "personal" websites are hosted on Linux, but I dev them on a Windows XP platform running Apache, MySQL and PHP. In my real job, I use mostly use "WIM." (Windows, IIS, MySQL and .NET web development)

I like PHP for my toy applications, but I can see where something Zend would be needed if you wanted to something serious with PHP. (Same reason I'd only use "modperl" if I ever wrote another perl-based web app.)

Re:I've been doing "WAMP" for years...

[dp_wiz]

And now Microsoft offers you a "WIMP" stack.

Makes sense

[Toreo asesino]

php is a very popular language (even if, in my opinion, a badly structured one), thus by making Windows the most popular platform for it, you've suddenly got an increase in demand. Microsoft don't do anything for free, and this is no exception.

Alleged problems..

[Savage-Rabbit]

Since when was it difficult to run PHP on Windows? I have written code that runs on both Linux and Windows machines, and, like most scripting languages, "it just works". There are a few extensions (like process control) that don't work under Windows - but the need for those extensions is very small. For a vast majority of scripting you don't need to do anything differently under Linux than you do Windows. I wish the article would have gone more in depth about these alleged problems.

Take this with a grain of salt since I'm no sysadmin but from what my friends in that line of business who operate big Win2k and Win2k3 servers tell me, PHP and IIS & Co. don't get along all that well at high loads on Windows server systems or at least not as well as you would expect in an enterprise environment where zero downtime is a must. I suppose this is, at least partly, an effort to increase the reliability/stability of the PHP+IIS combination and not just about adding features for programmers. Security enhancements and integration with Vista Server may also be part of this effort.

Re:Alleged problems..

[Anonymous Coward]

"Windows servers", "high loads", "enterprise environment", "zero downtime"

Okay, if you say so. But all releative and a contradiction for Windows on little iron boxes.

Re:Alleged problems..

[cosmicklev]

"Okay, if you say so. But all releative and a contradiction for Windows on little iron boxes." We run 15 shared hosting Windows 2003 boxes with an average of 900 sites on each box running a mix of ASP, ASP.NET and Perl and they run just fine. Windows if configured, managed and secured properly by experienced admins rather than by part time admins or the office secretary with an Office MCP does just fine. It's usually poorly written or buggy third party component libraries that cause all the grief.

"ASP?" C'mon, this is 2006...

[xxxJonBoyxxx]

"ASP?" C'mon, this is 2006...anyone doing pro web dev in Windows these days is using ASP.NET; it's a lot different than the old ASP/Perl/PHP scripting environments.

(So, you're probably right; if you're still using ASP, not much is going to stop you now.)

anything to get more users on IIS

[blindd0t]

...and less users on Apache and other alternatives.

PHP on Windows

[mgooderum]

If you read the attached article they're really talking about the performance deficit of PHP on Windows. Running PHP on Windows you have two primary server options - IIS and Apache, and then the various integration strategies (plug-in, CGI, FastCGI). In the case of IIS plug-ins with ISAPI there's a number of fiddling bits (like the ISAPI extension versus filter stuff) and getting all the settings right and quirky bits (example - I've never been able to mix PHP4 and PHP5 on one server with ISAPI). The most common setup is FastCGI - traditional CGI on Windows is painful because Windows process creation overhead is a lot more expensive - but FastCGI imposes tradeoffs on resources and performance and numbers of servers, etc.

All in all as a frequent user of PHP I figure this will benefit most of us. I worry a little less about extend and coopt here because I think Microsoft's primary motivation is to get you to stay on Windows Server/IIS even for your PHP platforms and then continue to try to push .NET down your throat.

As for MySQL - it's now owned by Oracle and IMHO Larry Ellison has a far better shot at being the antichrist than Bill Gates. Yes we have all that GPLd code but the company, talent and non-GPL rights to the code are owned by Oracle.

Another aside is both cases are examples that successful technology attracts attention and money regardless of the ideology or goals that spawned it. As someone who's been plugging away in development almost 20 years now I'd say the "success" part is tied more to market success and less to technological superiority - MySQL and PHP both end up strong on both counts, but neither would have attracted a whit's bit of interest if their market penetration was 2%.

Re:PHP on Windows

[Mad Merlin]

As for MySQL - it's now owned by Oracle and IMHO Larry Ellison has a far better shot at being the antichrist than Bill Gates. Yes we have all that GPLd code but the company, talent and non-GPL rights to the code are owned by Oracle.

Um... no. Oracle bought InnoDB and BDB (both separate projects from MySQL), two of the many backend formats that MySQL can use. It still has MyISAM and a few others, not to mention that Oracle hasn't bought MySQL itself or anything it owns.

Re:PHP on Windows

[Anonymous Coward]

Let's be realistic here: MySQL is a piece of shit... InnoDB made it marginally less shit and provided some of the things a relational database relies on. BDB provides a fast ultra-light option. MyISAM is braindead.

Oracle grabbed MySQL by the nuts when it bought those.

Re:PHP on Windows

[mgooderum]

Ooops, yeah, my bad, MM's correction is correct. But as AC notes, they have MySQL AB in a spot, especially now that they _also_ have bought SleepyCat/Berkeley DB.

Re:PHP on Windows

[RAMMS EIN]

``... I'd say the "success" part is tied more to market success and less to technological superiority - MySQL and PHP both end up strong on both counts''

Err, no. Both PHP and MySQL have been pretty amateurish. They're getting better, and MySQL is a decent database today, but PHP still has a long way to go. I'd say their successes are mostly due to hype.

Re:PHP on Windows

[elp]

Except not really because mysql now have SAP DB which is the backend for their maxdb product which is a _LOT_ better than anything SleepyCat ever produced.
My guess is that as soon as SleepyCat becomes a problem they will just merge the maxdb code into the standard mysql database and probably the only reason they haven't yet is that they are making too much money supporting all SAP customers.

Re:PHP on Windows

[elp]

This kind of stuff comes up on slashdot all the time, but I've yet to see any justification for it. PHP might not be that fast or stable under windows but under *nix it's very fast and stable. Mysql might not be the right choice for a fortune 500 financial system but its fast and stable for most web apps. Have you ever bothered to see who actually uses it?
Hmm. Lets see.... Mysql's website claims to have the following companies on board del.icio.us digg flickr wikipedia technorati trulia yahoo and craigslist. Also last time I checked slashdot was also using mysql, and just off the top of my head wikipedia and flickr are both PHP sites.

Re:PHP on Windows

[RAMMS EIN]

``This kind of stuff comes up on slashdot all the time, but I've yet to see any justification for it.''

Well, it depends what kind of justification you want. It seems you judge PHP and MySQL by who uses them. By that standard, indeed, they are doing well. However, I don't judge the quality of something by looking at who uses it, but by its qualities.

As a programming language, PHP is pretty wretched. It looks like a bunch of cobbled together functions with no consistency or underlying design. The scoping rules are awkward (you have to explicitly indicate if you want to access global variables from inside a function). Both the implementation and the APIs have been rich sources of vulnerabilities. The implementation sometimes just crashes (like when you try to do a MySQL operation when MySQL is down). For simple things, I can live with PHP's warts, but when writing larger or more complex applications, I wish for a Real programming language.

MySQL has traditionally been an extended subset of SQL. Several important features like transactions, constraints, sequences, and nested queries were not supported, or were supported, but in non-standard ways, tying your code to MySQL. Nowadays, it's a lot better, but it achieved its success long before it was even close to being technologically superior to other SQL databases.

Re:PHP on Windows

[elp]

you have to explicitly indicate if you want to access global variables from inside a function

I agree and it irritates me daily too, but its still no reason to condemn the language any more than pythons use of whitespace to delimit blocks is a reason to condemn it.

My day job is running an ISP with several thousand PHP/Mysql customers. Personally I've never seen the crashes you mentioned and we have some fairly intensive service monitoring in place. The security vulnerablilities are a problem but I've seen just as many SQL injection attacks under ASP and perl based CGI used to be notorious for its holes. As long as programmers are lazy and trust user input there are going to be problems. Those problems are already mostly solved under PHP if you turn off register_globals, never touch eval and use a DB library like ADODB that allows placeholders in SQL queries.

The thing with PHP and mysql is that it is so scalable. It can handle anything from a one page contact form to a multi server site like wikipedia. In the real world no one actually cares about the best or perfect, they want easy and "good enough". DBs like postgresql lost out because they were so obsessed about being academically perfect they forgot to make things easy for their users.

For simple things, I can live with PHP's warts, but when writing larger or more complex applications, I wish for a Real programming language.

I find all the object enhancements in PHP5 like the autoload function make it pretty good for larger applications. Whats your idea of a Real programming language thats widely supported?

Re:PHP on Windows

[RAMMS EIN]

``

you have to explicitly indicate if you want to access global variables from inside a function

I agree and it irritates me daily too, but its still no reason to condemn the language any more than pythons use of whitespace to delimit blocks is a reason to condemn it.''

Oh, no. On it's own, PHP's odd scoping isn't a reason to reject the whole language. However, it is an annoying misfeature, and it doesn't scale to situations where you have multiple levels of scoping (which is a useful feature). All in all, I see how annoying it is, but not what it's good for. Alright, so you want to differentiate between assigning to a global variable and declaring a local variable, but then why don't you just do that? E.g. by using different constructs for introducing new variables and assigning to existing ones.

``As long as programmers are lazy and trust user input there are going to be problems.''

You can completely eliminate that problem by providing safer APIs.

``Those problems are already mostly solved under PHP if you turn off register_globals, never touch eval and use a DB library like ADODB that allows placeholders in SQL queries.''

Exactly.

``The thing with PHP and mysql is that it is so scalable.''

More scalable than other solutions? Say, Perl and PostgreSQL?

``In the real world no one actually cares about the best or perfect, they want easy and "good enough".''

True. On the other hand, you can see where this has lead us: the security lists are full of vulnerabilities that could be eliminated with better languages: buffer overflows in C programs, injection vulnerabilities in PHP, etc.

``DBs like postgresql lost out because they were so obsessed about being academically perfect they forgot to make things easy for their users.''

I'm not so sure. I don't find PostgreSQL any harder to use than MySQL. Easier, actually. When I still worked with MySQL, it lacked certain features, which had to be worked around in the program using the database. None of that has been necessary with PostgreSQL.

``

For simple things, I can live with PHP's warts, but when writing larger or more complex applications, I wish for a Real programming language.

I find all the object enhancements in PHP5 like the autoload function make it pretty good for larger applications. Whats your idea of a Real programming language thats widely supported?''

Well, to be honest, I don't know any programming language that I'm perfectly happy with. However, I find PHP lacks design, elegance, and certain abstractions (functional programming is very elegant, but less so in PHP). Several languages do better on these counts, especially Ruby and the various Lisp dialects. Unfortunately, none of these are very good at catching errors at compile time, something that is very valuable, especially for larger projects. Perhaps OCaml would be a good choice, though I haven't really written anything large in that language yet.

How long will Zend last?

[baomike]

Gone in two years?
could they last three?

In other news...

[Karem Lore]

Microsoft has just announced a new language said to potentially drive the future of the web...

drum roll

drum roll

PHP Sharp, or PHP# for short...

Re:In other news...

[Anonymous Coward]

I swear, it's like there's a bunch of Open Source projects on a large dartboard in Redmond and they choose which ones to work with next by having Ballmer throw a chair at it.

Then they trank and cage him up until they need him to pick again...or whenever Gloria Estefan needs a backup dancer.

Re:In other news...

[Daltorak]

I know you meant that as a joke, but something very close actually exists! Have a look at Phalanger, the PHP Language Compiler for .NET Framework.

This is the hug of the bear

[Anonymous Coward]

Beware. This may well be a tactic to stall the development of key open source projects. Note that Microsoft has done a similar deal with Xen (virtualization). By offering a small amount of money (for Microsoft), they gain control over the direction of the project.

Microsoft has invested in SCO. Do you think they changed their mind about open source one day to the other? No.

I wouldn't be surprised to see more of these deal with other open source firms (think Red Hat, Novell, ...).

The only way to protect open source is by GPL'ing it and keeping it out of the enterprise sphere. Community is harder buy.

Re:This is the hug of the bear

[Generic Player]

"The only way to protect open source is by GPL'ing it and keeping it out of the enterprise sphere."

Yep, just look at what happened to all the freely licensed software used in enterprises all the time, like apache for instance. Too bad it was taken over by those evil corporations and now we can't use it any more huh? If only they had GPL'd it and somehow magically kept it "out of the enterprise sphere", we'd still be able to have webservers.

Re:This is the hug of the bear

[Anonymous Coward]

Zend != PHP

M$ isn't partnering with an open source project, they are partnering with a company who happens to sell products that work with an open source tool.

what does Zend have worth stealing?

[wardk]

this can't be about making PHP work better. MS doesn't enter into agreements unless there is something worth steali...er innovating.

Re:what does Zend have worth stealing?

[PHPfanboy]

Actually it *is* about having PHP (multi-process *nix background) run better on Windows (multi-threaded environment).

It's about MSFT being whipped in the hosting business (despite GoDaddy) and losing servers at the Workgroups level. I don't think it will help them much, but it might.

Special MS PHP?

[pestilence669]

This isn't good news for any party. Is this the beginning of a "special" PHP version for Windows? It's not as far fetched as it sounds.

C++ in Visual Studio is not exactly standards compliant. It's definitely Microsoft specific, as is their: HTML, CSS, XML, Java, TCP/IP stack, HTTP negotiation, LDAP, kerberos, DNS, DHCP, etc., etc. Every "standard" and language they adopt gets altered, even when completely unnecessary.

What on earth will they do to PHP? Assimilate it into .NET?

What PHP really needs is a MS SQL driver that doesn't leak memory and cause access violations. Microsoft hasn't supported their C library in years. PHP doesn't need any "help" from Microsoft, IMHO.

Re:Special MS PHP?

[A Friendly Troll]

What on earth will they [Microsoft] do to PHP? Assimilate it into .NET?

Already been done by a 3rd party: Phalanger

The benchmarks are interesting... I suppose that stuff works about as fast as Apache+PHP on a libre OS.

Re:Special MS PHP?

[nuzak]

> What on earth will they do to PHP? Assimilate it into .NET?

Quite possibly. It's already been assimilated into Java

Re:Special MS PHP?

[PsychicX]

C++ in Visual Studio is not exactly standards compliant. It's definitely Microsoft specific

Do you have any idea what you're talking about? VC 8 is right on par with GCC 4.0 in terms of C++ '99 (and 2003 rev) compliance. Yes they have some extensions, but so does GCC and pretty much every other compiler out there. Hell, GCC probably has more extensions than VC does. Obviously if portability is a concern, you don't use vendor specific extensions -- regardless of what vendor it is.

What PHP really needs is a MS SQL driver that doesn't leak memory and cause access violations.

You may want to double check for any PEBKAC issues you may be experiencing.

Re:Special MS PHP?

[nkeric]

Can't agree more! I guess by adopting php, MS is playing the "embrace & extend" game again: first they make the php works "better" on Windows platform; then they added "extra features" that only works with IIS, so developers have to stick to Windows/IIS... let's ensure that there are MORE extra features when combining php with Apache :)

Re:Special MS PHP?

[pestilence669]

Yes, I do have a really good idea of what I'm talking about. I'm not quoting the spec sheets, I actively use both compilers with exceptionally large codebases. I have quite a bit of experience creating portable code between GCC and VC8 and Intel's compiler.

I'm not talking about vendor specific extensions, of which there are many. I'm talking about actual deviations from the C++ standard. Microsoft has made big strides, and this is the closest they've come so far to a truely standard C++ compiler, but VC8 still comes up a little short. If you want to experience a headache... try exporting a CString in a DLL or declaring your own STL allocator. Hell, just try to compile any complex template in VC8.

As far as the MS SQL driver not working... ntwdblib.dll is deprecated and ancient. It lacks "high-end" SQL Server features like Unicode. It's buggy and always has been. I've used it with VC++ and PHP. It just happens to be what PHP uses natively (even with PDO). If you deploy on Linux, FreeTDS does a MUCH better job... it doesn't leak memory nor does it cause access violations. It would be great if PDO used say... the COM or ADO adapter for MS SQL Server. I've even seen PHP's native mssql_query() function return the source code for the script. Not exactly a "solid" driver.

Re:Special MS PHP?

[goltrpoat]

Hell, just try to compile any complex template in VC8.

More fear-mongering. Loki compiles under 2005. Boost compiles under 2005. I've personally done a stupid amount of template metaprogramming in 2005. Try again.

-goltrpoat

Re:Special MS PHP?

[shutdown -p now]

What on earth will they do to PHP? Assimilate it into .NET?

As a .NET developer, I sure hope not. We already have one curse which is VB, another such would be too much.

Re:No problem. Yet.

[Not The Real Me]

Microsoft will be coming up with a brand new language for IIS and web developers, it will be called PHP# Dot Net. PHP# Dot Net will be bundled in the next Visual Studio upgrade. It's part of Microsoft's strategy to innovate.

Re:Hooray for Microsoft Zend 2007, Ultimate Editio

[mrsbrisby]

Seriously. Every time Microsoft partners with someone it means they're doomed. Remember when Microsoft "partnered" with any of these guys?

* Netscape
* Palm
* Symantec and McAfee
* Sendo

Have to agree

[Ant P.]

After using PHP for 4 years, I can say with some authority that it's complete shit. They're supposed to be fixing some of the most serious design flaws in PHP 6, but I don't think I'll still be using it by then.

Re:Have to agree

[Senzei]

After using PHP for 4 years, I can say with some authority that it's complete shit. They're supposed to be fixing some of the most serious design flaws in PHP 6, but I don't think I'll still be using it by then.

They can fix stuff in PHP$X all they want, if they can't get hosting providers and the general population to migrate to it their fixes don't mean a whole lot.

Indeed it is

[Jesus_666]

It has lots of syntactic sugar and the ability to hack together a quick and dirty app in little time. Like VB is great for rapid prototyping and the creation of small utility apps where C++ would be overkill PHP is great for rapid prototyping and quick and/or temporary scripts.

PHP is no [insert your favourite script language here], but like VB it does have its place. It could use a major overhaul, but the concept makes sense. (Also, PHP makes for a somewhat useful generic preprocessor. Not the prettiest solution but it does work.)

a match made in vulnerability hell

[greenpotatochip]

holy vulnerable software batman, the riddler and the joker have joined forces!

Makes Perfect Sense

[Anonymous Coward]

Everyone knows that anything with the Microslop brand name is completely insecure, and PHP-based applications have a long-running history of being wildly susceptible to exploitation and are the most-targeted favorites of hackers, so it actually makes perfect sense for Microslop to embrace PHP - they're two peas in a pod.

Market Share

[everphilski]

They'd be stealing market share, people would be more willing to host on Windows boxes over linux boxes if the performance was comparable/better. Right now the performance isn't as good as a linux box.

what new product with MS release next?

[Anonymous Coward]

Microsoft PHP .net?

Microsoft P#?

Microsoft P++ (.net?)?

this is only microsofts first step in fragmenting the popularity of php into windows-centric flavors

Re:Hooray for Microsoft Zend 2007, Ultimate Editio

[LVWolfman]

Here's another more fitting example... Remember the Sybase partnership? Wasn't too many years before MS released MS SQL which "just happens" to be totally Sybase compatible and then didn't need Sybase. How about Foxpro?

I remember reading some interviews with companies whose technology had been "innovated" by Microsoft. One guy said (paraphrased), "It's a catch-22. If you partner with them, they get cheap access to your technology and take it from you. If you don't partner with them, they'll go to your competition and that might be the one time that the partnership works for the competition."

Seriously. Every time Microsoft partners with someone it means they're doomed. Remember when Microsoft "partnered" with any of these guys?

* Netscape
* Palm
* Symantec and McAfee
* Sendo

Re:No problem. Yet.

[Alternate Interior]

I would love to see PHP.net (or PHP# .net). A standardized framework and huge code library would beat the hell out of the billion frameworks and Pear that we have today.

It could just be

[slapout]

that they are afraid that Zend will sue them because "Zune" is so similar--so they're making nice.

This is an unexpected move. At OSS.

[Qbertino]

This is squarely aimed against OSS and all it stands for.
Desktop Linux hasn't caught on. Not yet. But PHP has. Like it or not, PHP has turned into the king of the server-side. MS must have noticed how much it's gnawing at ASPs marketshare (Just did a comment on that the other day). PHP even has turned into a brigdehead for Linux at this point. That they'd team up with Zend is an unexpected but somewhat fitting move.
I've never really known what to make of Zend. Their PHP groundwork is fair enough, but all-in-all I allways was weary about what they're up to. Their entire Zend Plattform sheebang allways came across to me as somewhat suspicious. Could it be that MS tries to take on OSS via the popular OSS languages? Zend seems to be the right candidate and can - like everyone else - easyly be convinced by a fat wad of MS cash to fork of 90% of their time on 'optimizing' for MS. And we all know what that means.

In the end this can only turn out bad if MS stays with PHP. They are still way to powerfull and have to much mindshare to not overtake things. Joining a Linux shop would be suspicious and they'd give themselves away. Joining a big player of an OSS language though is something entirely different. Zend with PHP is the ideal candidate for such a move.

Right know that I've gone PHP fullscale they do a stunt like this. 'guess I'm gonna continue to keep my Python skills up-to-date aswell. ... Just imagine the same crap as with Ecma JavaScript and MS JScript with OSS PHP and the "MS PHP Engine" or something. Give me the creeps just thinking of it. ... Oh, and not to forget the RoRails zealots in the OSS camp. They're gonna have a field week ranting over PHP with this new ammunition. Just great.
Thank you, MS, you made my day once again.

Re:This is an unexpected move. At OSS.

[Decaff]

Like it or not, PHP has turned into the king of the server-side

Not quite yet.

From dice.com - one of the best known IT job sites.

Today, out of around 96,000 jobs:

Java or J2EE 16,777
ASP 3165
PHP 1216
Ruby on Rails 350

Yes, I know jobs aren't that accurate as a measure of technology use, and there are a lot of smaller PHP projects, and so on, but we are talking about a ratio of Java : PHP of more than 10:1.

PHP is very popular, and will remain so, but to claim it is 'king' of the server-side is wildly exaggerating, it would seem.

Re:This is an unexpected move. At OSS.

[Maul]

My thoughts on this are pretty similar to yours. PHP is a part of a very popular "solution" that is currently built entirely off of open source. People with little to no coding skills can easily set up a web site using Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP. There are literally thousands of freely available webb apps built off of "LAMP" that are fairly customizable. Zero software licensing costs. Thousands of successful web sites are making money right now using open source solutions, and Microsoft certainly wants to find a way to "own it" themselves so that they can exort this market for licensing fees.

Re:This is an unexpected move. At OSS.

[sillybilly]

Hopefully MS will wake up and stop forcefeeding people their "dotnet visionary strategy initiative" bullshit, because it's patented. Sometimes you just don't care about pedantry, sometimes you just want to get stuff done fast and easy. Dotnet isn't the way. I look at the same webcode in dotnet, asp, php, perl, etc, and of all the perl code is the shortest but also too cryptic - it doesn't feel human to me, because I don't know perl - but other than that php is the least complicated "human readable" way to accomplish something. I don't really know php either, I just look at it, read it and yay! I can tell what it's doing easily just by knowing English and some basics in programming. To me the more complicated a piece of code is, the harder it is to later come back to it and reunderstand what the heck it's doing and add features or fix bugs. I'm willing to sacrifice humanity if I get something in exchange, such as super performance, as in C, but not where you neither get performance nore ease of use. What good is a pedantic programming language if I wear out mentally even before I get to the "hello world" part. For instance I only had to read the first line of any dotnet code to just toss it and forget about it. Using dotnet or java is like an insult to my intelligence. I don't want to read through miles of "using system.console.subsystem.graphics.pointer.mouse.us bmouse.usbmouse(1).pointer.appearance="default" ", go bother someone else with proper pedantry like that, I don't want to have to specify things that I don't care about, it's nice to have it as an option to specify it, but don't force me to do stupid superfluous shit and wear me out mentally just by having to read miles and miles of characters. On the other hand perl errs on the other side of the balance, too few characters, but I guess for people who are used to perl and feel like fish in water reading it, perl must me something wonderful, but I don't know how anybody loves the oververbose programming languages, perhaps other than some purists who get off on programming as an art for the sake of programming, instead of having to get something done very quickly and very efficiently, and then later be able to come back and tweak it, without it being too mysterious to explain even to nonprogrammers to see what's going on. I guess the worse and more obfuscated a language is, the more job security you have, and the bigger the artificially divide between "professional" programmers, and everyday people. After all how are you gonna have a software economy if anyone can roll their own code, instead of having to hire an "expert", who knows to to dig through the artificially created complexity.

Re:This is an unexpected move. At OSS.

[Anonymous Coward]

Don't forget that Zend != PHP. M$ and Zend can scheme all they want, but that won't in any way affect the PHP project. They can submit patches like everyone else, and if they make sense and improve PHP on Windows, great, they go in. If they don't make sense, they don't go in and no amount of partnering or press releases will make a damn bit of difference.

Re:This is an unexpected move. At OSS.

[MightyYar]

If I wanted to start a flame war, I might point out that it might just be that Java is 10x harder to implement and takes 10x the resources, thus 10x the job availability. :)

Re:This is an unexpected move. At OSS.

[Decaff]

If I wanted to start a flame war, I might point out that it might just be that Java is 10x harder to implement and takes 10x the resources, thus 10x the job availability. :)

You could, but as even the Ruby on Rails zealots are only claiming a 5 x boost over working with Java (which I don't believe, as Java apps tend to be much more substantial that RoR apps, at which point good tools and compile-time checking can be valuable), so there would be little basis to this claim.

Re:This is an unexpected move. At OSS.

[Allador]

"Like it or not, PHP has turned into the king of the server-side."

Are you serious? PHP is the king of the very-low-end on dynamic web platforms, I'll give you that. But its a pure web-solution. You would never build a no-UI financial processing engine, for example, on PHP. You may build the web-based front-end to the java- or .net-based financial processing engine though, if thats the skill you have in your shop.

In my experience, the most common user of PHP is the amateur web-designer who is just breaking into programming, and wants a mechanism to send email from a web-form (and usually end up creating a spam-relay in the process). Then they slowly expand their knowledge and learn how to program from there. Dont get me wrong, its great for that, much like ASP was back in the days before .NET, and provides a valuable niche. But its hardly the king of server side programming languages.

"MS must have noticed how much it's gnawing at ASPs marketshare (Just did a comment on that the other day)."

I'm not sure if you mean ASP or ASP.NET here. If the former, its not relevant as ASP is dead and has been for years. If you mean the latter, than you're talking apples and oranges. PHP and ASP.NET solve completely different problem spaces. You could overlap them, but it wouldnt be optimal.

Re:No problem. Yet.

[Gospodin]

Well.... here.

That was easy. :)

CmdrTaco vs Kevin Rose

[Anonymous Coward]

Discuss.

This exact comment has already been posted. Try to be more original...

Next Target

[nurb432]

Seems microsoft has chosen another target to 'embrace, extend, destroy'.

Oh god

[Mancat]

Do you think that Microsoft would just like to improve IIS' PHP support? You know, so that they might attract more web developers to the IIS platform naturally?

God no. They must be trying to destroy it.

Slashdot logic.

Re:Oh god

[Salsaman]

It's not "slashdot logic". It's called "past experience".

Re:No problem. Yet.

[scuba0]

I would too like to see that. But then I remembered that you said standard and a microsoft product in the same sentence... Because you don't expect mirosoft to just cut and past do you?, of course they will make a new better product.

This makes me worry

[EtherAlchemist]

Microsoft is notorious for not following set standards and instead doing what it think is right/better/best, causing the development community to work twice as hard to support it in some cases.

What worries me is that this will turn into some bastardization of PHP that is "tuned" for Windows and then requires hacks or work arounds to get things to work on other platforms.

What might actually be worse would be features that are only available in PHP running on Windows. *sigh*

Also, a little OT, I admit my first impression is that this is the first step in MS playing "me too" by including languages and frameworks other than their own in their operating system (as Linux and Mac do) to woo developers to the platform. e.g. "Look how easy it is to build web apps on Windows with PHP" etc.

So, if anyone from MS is reading, do good by the community and do good for yourselves by not fucking this up. Thanks.

A good thing

[talonyx]

PHP is licensed under the GPL, so we don't need to worry about an MS-proprietary version of it. They'd have to reimplement the system from scratch, and who would bother to do that when they have ASP.NET?

I for one would love to see .NET support for PHP so I could use it to write native Windows GUI programs, access ODBC in a more robust fashion, and get more access to Windows-internal stuff that is so easy to do on Unix but so hard to do on Windows.
A bit of performance would be nice, but chances are I will keep running my servers on Debian simply because that's all they are: brainless webservers with muscle and nothing holding them back.

Re:A good thing

[shutdown -p now]

I for one would love to see .NET support for PHP so I could use it to write native Windows GUI programs, access ODBC in a more robust fashion, and get more access to Windows-internal stuff that is so easy to do on Unix but so hard to do on Windows.

Why would you even want to do GUI or system programming in PHP??

Obvious theft

[PacketScan]

I think this is obvious to anyone that has been around the block..
They are going to steal key tech from zend and use it in their own web server.
win-php 2009

Re:No problem. Yet.

[Alternate Interior]

I'm talking about ASP.net being Microsoft's standard PHP framework. .net is a library/framework, not a language.

Platform: Windows
Language: C#/PHP/VB
Library: .net
Framework: .net

Business Sense

[aquai]

I doubt very much that Zend would evaluate a partnership like this as being, or creating a business disadvantage to the PHP platform. I also doubt very much that Zend ever had a mission of being exlusively on any one platform. That says to me they will aggressively develop PHP - and use this to their advantage in providing best of breed web scripting technologies. The real question is how this will or will/not work with ASP. Also interesting to see Andi's response to Microsoft's interview on the lab site: http://port25.technet.com/archive/2006/10/31/Talki ng-with-Andi-Gutmans-about-Zend-and-working-with-M icrosoft-to-improve-PHP-Performance-on-Windows.asp x

I've been meaning to switch to cgic for a while

[Anonymous Coward]

This will provide the final push to make me start producing all my new web code using cgic:

http://www.boutell.com/cgic/

why?

[Bizzeh]

this was a little out of the blue...

Re:No problem. Yet.

[WilliamSChips]

As a Dalek, I think you mean their stage three is EX-TER-MI-NATE!

again and again...

[AlgorithMan]

Embrace, Extend and Extinguish look it up http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace%2C_extend_and _extinguish

Better then Visual BASIC or Access

[JoeCommodore]

Same here I develop PHP in an organization, it's a great language (even better when you know how to program) and it is good news as I will something to point to them to keep them (PHBs) at bay from jumping to Visual Basic or Access because its MS supported.

Re:anything to get... users on IIS - MOD PARENT UP

[AslanTheMentat]

mod parent up. Seriously though, this is perhaps the one single moustache-twisting strategy I could actually see coming out of MS (beyond tin-foil'd, if historically supported, "embrace and extend (read "extinguish")" strategy).

Currently the seemly "best" way to get a good PHP experience on Windows is to use mod_php w/ Apache. It is just my humble experience that the majority of the nasty problems are with people attempting to use the CGI method on Windows (that is, if you look past all the ubiquitous noob questions... PHP is a serious gateway drug...)

If there was a tighter integration between IIS and PHP such that it could be brought into the MS stack, they hope to replace LAMP installations presumably with WISP (Windows, IIS, SQLServer, PHP).

On a lighter note, OS X is including python and ruby complete with bridges "in place" to do Cocoa development... :)

George Bush vs a Rhesus Monkey

[WilliamSChips]

Discuss.

Re:George Bush vs a Rhesus Monkey

[Anonymous Coward]

You totally ruined my thread. The two things are supposed to be different not the same.

Re:George Bush vs a Rhesus Monkey

[el cisne]

Rhesus has better command of the English language and grammar, and is capable of learning from mistakes.

Re:George Bush vs a Rhesus Monkey

[dch24]

So I went to one of the good places for lunch today and the cute chick at the cash register was wearing a monkey outfit.

"Hey, how come no one else is in costume today?"

"Oh, they all forgot. So what do you think of my costume?"

"Uh, it's pretty good. George Bush, right?"

She laughed. But no, I didn't ask her out.

I thought it was Sun

[b17bmbr]

Sun to control PHP?

but it still doesn't answer whether there will be windows only PHP extensions. Will it be another java type fiasco, this time with incompatible PHP's? I certainly hope not. If this is MS's way of screwing it up so badly that people say "screw PHP", kinda like MS did with CSS and IE, that would royally suck. Zend, and all PHP developers should be very wary.

Re:I thought it was Sun

[Anonymous Coward]

Press releases and partnerships mean nothing. What counts is what ends up being accepted into PHP and Zend+M$ have no control over that. There are already M$-specific extensions to speak to M$-specific stuff just like there are Linux-specific extensions to speak to Linux-specific stuff.

Since PHP is an open source project that isn't controlled by any one company, the only attack vector M$ has here is to make PHP work better on Windows than it does on Linux. And they can't do it by making it suck on Linux because any such code submissions would obviously be laughed at. But if they submit patches to make it faster and more reliable on Windows or if they fix IIS and ISAPI or introduce decent FastCGI support to make it work better on Windows, more power to them. This is the sort of thing we want from M$. If this makes you uncomfortable then you don't seem to have much faith in the technical abilities of the open source community.

EWeek already thinks WinPHP best

[hirschma]

See the pretty charts and the article.

Pretty much, EWeek found that the OSS stacks run best on Windows. Now, is this because EWeek ran everything without tuning? Possibly. But then again, so do most folks, so the results are pretty valid.

I bet that someone at MS was reading that, too.

jh

Big Freaking Deal

[Petersko]

"Pulling Zend off my Apache box now. Embrace, Extend, Extinguish isn't going to get me this time."

The fact that you can pull it off of your apache box at the drop of a hat when righteous indignation strikes means you aren't using it for a single thing that is important. Am I supposed to be impressed that you're taking a stand by removing a product you're not really using?

PHP is not GPLed

[VolkerLanz]

PHP is licensed under the GPL, so we don't need to worry about an MS-proprietary version of it.

PHP is not licensed under the GPL. It comes with its own license, called "The PHP License" (3.0 in the sources I have here). Looks like a BSD-like license to me at a quick glance.

I vaguely remember PHP not being GPLed the reason that MySQL made an exception in their licensing of the database to allow PHP to work and talk with it (MySQL consider communication over TCP/IP as derivative work, IIRC).

Re:PHP is not GPLed

[Anonymous Coward]

And what they are really doing is buying off the main PHP developers. They're now fat and happy, so they do less work (spend more time shopping for private islands ;) ) and the language falls behind as ASP and other languages evolve. Someone should track their buglist, see how problems (particularly on non-M$ platforms) grow and don't get solved (or get solved badly)......

Re:Why are people freaking out?!?!

[Duggeek]

You do realize that it's meant to look like "good news".

Let's review M$ history for a moment...

• 1987: Microsoft co-creates OS/2 with IBM (good news)
  OS/2 barely sees the light of day and must compete with equally-ailing Windows 2.0 (bad news)
• 1990: Microsoft Windows 3.0 released (good news)
  It took almost seven years to get it right.(bad news)
• 1992: Microsoft Windows 3.1 finally released (good news)
  "OS/2"? Who uses OS/2? (bad news for IBM)
• 1992: Microsoft Windows NT comes on the heels of 3.1 (good news)
  Should have been OS/3. (bad news for IBM, again)
• 1993: MS-DOS 6.0 released (good news)
  DoubleSpace. (bad news)
• 1995: Microsoft Windows95 introduces new "32bit paradigm" to PC desktop. (good news)
  Microsoft BOB. (bad news)
• 1996: Microsoft unveils ActiveX (good news)
  Microsoft unveils ActiveX. (bad News)
• 1997: Microsoft Internet Explorer 4.0 (good news)
  The Internet has been going on for five years already. (bad News)
• 1998: Microsoft Windows 98 (good news)
  Windows CE. (bad News)
• 2000: Microsoft Windows 2000 (good news)
  Windows Millenium Edition (bad News)

The point is, if MS is going to get involved, they're in it for one thing; profit.

HTML begat DHTML, plug-ins begat ActiveX, Yahoo begat MSN. History is riddled with attempts by M$ to re-make things that already work fine, or they have taken it over entirely. (alas, Mosaic... VRML... cgi...)

We may (or may not) be "freaking out", but I think we are all a bit concerned. Based on the track record, how can any good really come from this?

Acquiring security holes strategy

[gravy.jones]

Microsoft just wants to make sure that it has the most security holes per line of code.

Re:Hooray for Microsoft Zend 2007, Ultimate Editio

[mabhatter654]

but Zend is also partnering with IBM to get PHP on iSeries as a supported feature. On one hand this is good, PHP is getting OFFICAL support everywhere. On the other hand, getting in bed with Microsoft offically always means trouble, it's historical fact. Zend's key profit points are the PHP compilers and Zend studio. Much like the recent Oracle/Red Hat thing, I see Microsoft putting PHP into Visual Studio and tying it's performance to their MSSql server... then rolling their own PHP and kicking Zend out.

Microsoft will sell PHP?

[vhogemann]

This is serious.

Out of the box, PHP has a terrible performance. Really, it sucks.

Try installing a complex PHP application, like Horde3 for example, and trowing something like 600 simultaneous users at it. Your server will crawl, PHP4 parse every darned line of code every time it has to run the code! Result? 100% CPU all the time... and lots of dropped connections, and timeouts at client side.

The solution was use a third part tool to cache the parsed pages, and gain some performance... Zend does exactly this, but as we didn't had the option to buy anything the solution was the Turck-MMCache [http://turck-mmcache.sourceforge.net/]. It claims a performance boot around 6000%, year that is six thousand percent, and I confirm that.

My point is... If Microsoft begin to sell a PHP version optimized for IIS, and if it performs better (6000 times better) than a vanilla Linux running Apache+PHP... well, Microsoft might be able to take the "P" from LAMP.

Just my $0.02

Re:Microsoft will sell PHP?

[Super_Z]

Try APC

Re:Microsoft will sell PHP?

[phobonetik]

Ahh, which language are you implying DOES support 600 simutanous users on a server?

I've never heard someone yell out to me that Python, Perl or .NET or Java are in any way performance-oriented (they're far more of postgres than mysql focus, say)

Horde3 is a system written in PHP, and could probably be improved to work far better. We've created our own complex PHP systems and if someone pays us to optimise, it is fairly easy to get page creation times to 50ms. On an average dual processor machine (e.g Xeon 2.2ghz, which I've tested) that means 40 pages/sec, which supports 600 users if you assume a user changing page on average every 15 seconds.

Also, PHP5 has a number of accelerator projects, which presumeably could be incorporated as a debian package if only a maintainer had the time (this would quickly heighten adoption of it. Presumeably, though, that would limit Zend's accelerator sales and thus isn't actively pushed?). See http://eaccelerator.net/

Re:Microsoft will sell PHP?

[Anonymous Coward]

Try installing a complex PHP application, like Horde3 for example, and trowing something like 600 simultaneous users at it. Your server will crawl, PHP4 parse every darned line of code every time it has to run the code! Result? 100% CPU all the time... and lots of dropped connections, and timeouts at client side.

Use a well coded complex php application and eAccelerator and you'll be fine. I can't count how many times I've seen carelessly placed preg_replace/match calls inside a loop that will get executed thousands of times. Some people just don't know how to write efficient php code.

Perl however, does exactly what you describe, it will bring a server to its knees rapidly. Gee I wonder why slashdot generates static pages? Hmmmm... Ever count how long it takes to process a post on slashdot? Totally unacceptable.

PHP outperforms Perl by a large margin. I can't say anything on PHP vs Ruby though as I have not run ruby, I just cannot see the need.

w.i.m.p.

[graveyhead]

Getting in the dicussion a bit late but oh well.

This is clearly their way to infiltrate the open source LAMP stack:

    * W indows
    * I nternet Information Server
    * M S SQL
    * P HP

Clearly, the acronym of the future :-P

Why on earth is parent modded insightful?

[goltrpoat]

Not standards compliant? Can you name a portion of the standard that 2005 implements in a more restricted manner than GCC does, or are you just spouting bullshit because you're a karma whore, and slashdotters like to bash on Microsoft? Do you have *any* idea what you're talking about?

Yeah, thought so.

-goltrpoat

Re:Why on earth is parent modded insightful?

[pestilence669]

Generics. VC8 is less compliant than VC6 in some respects.

Re:Why on earth is parent modded insightful?

[Trelane]

Could you please be more specific? A Dr. Dobbs article showed Visual C++ 2005 as being pretty good standards-wise, from some test suite they did (more compliant than gcc 3-something, iirc). I don't know how they chose their tests, however. I'm pretty sure it wasn't complete, though.

Re:Why on earth is parent modded insightful?

[pestilence669]

Offering specific examples is a pain without pasting code up here. I can't paste source that's not my own. I would ordinarily write repro code, but I don't have a VC8 compiler in front of me at this very moment.

I've searched for a few of the issues I can remember were problems during a recent porting effort. Luckily, others have had similar (albeit, not identical) experiences. These are far from all of the issues I've had. It's just a very small sampling.

The most frustrating thing is the internal compiler errors that get spit out. Sometimes you get a descriptive warning and other times you simply get a compiler crash. You do know what file causes the problem, but it's time intensive to isolate for large files.

As far as deviation from standards... I consider some of these bugs to be deviation from C++ because they prevent working C++ code from compiling. I wish I could have found better examples. Working around the limitations for template specialization was a big one for me. Some of these bugs will be fixed in SP1 and others in the next paid upgrade.

http://connect.microsoft.com/VisualStudio/feedback /ViewFeedback.aspx?FeedbackID=101619
http://connect.microsoft.com/VisualStudio/feedback /ViewFeedback.aspx?FeedbackID=216989
http://connect.microsoft.com/VisualStudio/feedback /ViewFeedback.aspx?FeedbackID=200279 (can work around)
http://connect.microsoft.com/VisualStudio/feedback /ViewFeedback.aspx?FeedbackID=101943 (dumb example)

Plain 'ol bugs:
http://connect.microsoft.com/VisualStudio/feedback /ViewFeedback.aspx?FeedbackID=203216
http://connect.microsoft.com/VisualStudio/feedback /ViewFeedback.aspx?FeedbackID=158446

Intellisense Crashing (painfully annoying):
http://connect.microsoft.com/VisualStudio/feedback /ViewFeedback.aspx?FeedbackID=105847
http://connect.microsoft.com/VisualStudio/feedback /ViewFeedback.aspx?FeedbackID=91030

I had a great number of problems using our custom STL allocators when exporting within DLLs. The code compiles, but it crashes instantly. We couldn't resolve it, so we dropped the custom allocator. MOST of the problems I've had in 2005 can be solved by rewriting the code. There's a few gotcha's that require refactoring. I've read the docs on expected breakage for conformance many times. They just don't address every case.

It's more difficult than it should be

[Sycraft-fu]

When you install PHP on a Windows server it's painfully obvious that it was developed for UNIX and ported. Now that's fine, but a real, proper port is one that feels like it was developed naively on Windows. Things like a nice GUI installer that handles all the configuration automatically and just asks the couple questions needed, a control panel snap-in to configure it rather than a text file, having stderr dumped some place more useful than a dialogue box on the console (make it fun to debug remote).

None of this is major, I don't think it took me more than an hour to get PHP running on an IIS server and I'd never set it up before, even on Linux, but it was more difficult than it should be. It is much less slick next to, say, ActivePERL, when it comes to setup. So that's an area for improvement that hopefully MS could help with. Make it so that PHP is just an MSI download that does everything for you. Make it that easy, and maybe you see more of it in the Windows world. As it stands I can see an admin (not a good admin but there are plenty that aren't) saying "Fuck it, this is more work than it should be, use .NET."

not an asp vs php issue its an IIS issue

[Anonymous Coward]

This is great!! I don't think this is an issue over Asp.net and PHP.

lots of people use either one and have their preferences.

but have you tried to install PHP on a windows IIS server? IT'S F-ing HARD!!

the sys-admin still hasn't figured it out where I work and it's been a few months. now granted it's not a pressing issue, and he has a lot of other things to do. but there for a while he was racking his brain wondering why it wouldn't work. we must have went through all kinds of tutorials online and still no go.

so this is a real good thing for people who want to use php but can't choose their own server software.

*sighs* oh well...

[Monoliath]

I will not use any product / current product updates of this union.

If that means dropping PHP as my primary web-based app. development language and turning to ruby / rails / (jesus even) cfusion / perl etc. so be it...simply on general principle.

How in the world could Zend even consider this?

The whole point of open source is to get away from this kind of hegemony...now they're buying into it? ...Did I miss something? Why do they have to 'partner' with M$oft to ensure better performance? What is this, the mafia?

Re:*sighs* oh well...

[Anonymous Coward]

Agree wholeheartedly... PHP is dead to me now.

Time for a change?

[symbolset]

A Quick, Painless Tutorial on the Python Language

No, this is not off topic. Friends don't let friends use Visual PHP#.net.

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Ahhhh, Slashdot.

[Weaselmancer]

I make a post, and get modded -1, Troll. You agree with me, and get Insightful.

Ah well, enjoy it my friend! Such are the fortunes of Slashdot karma.

Re:Hooray for Microsoft Zend 2007, Ultimate Editio

[Anonymous Coward]

Here's another more fitting example... Remember the Sybase partnership? Wasn't too many years before MS released MS SQL which "just happens" to be totally Sybase compatible and then didn't need Sybase. How about Foxpro?

Uh, no. Microsoft worked *with* Sybase from 87-94 when Microsoft owned the NT and OS/2 versions and Sybase had the Unix big-iron versions. Sybase on NT (in name, at least) only happened after they dissolved the partnership.

LAMP would become WIMP

[Anonymous Coward]

If your logic holds up then Linux Apache Mysql PHP would have the L for Linux replaced with the W for Windows and the A for Apache replaced with the I for ISS (or IIS I keep forgetting and not caring).

WIMP, now that is a platform name to hitch your wagon too.

As for what I think of the deal. MS has never ever done anything nice for anyone ever. They ain't evil as such, they are just always only intrested in their own gain and never ever intrested in anybody else.

So with that track record how likely is it to be that at least as far MS is concerned this is going to benefit them most?

Now some might say that both could benefit but ask yourselve this. Is it to MS benefit that an opensource project/language benefits?

No, so what ever MS plan is, it most certainly won't involve any benefit to the OSS community. It just wouldn't benefit MS itself.

PR stunt

[Pecisk]

Just to keep PHP services to migrate from buggy Windows to BSD/Linux. Anyway, this press release doesn't say any concrete things (When PHP wasn't usable under Windows?), so it is smell like PR dunk to give breathing space for Windows 2003 Server and Vista server.

Of course, just my imho,
Peter.

Java?

[jproffer]

Anyone smell a Java being pulled out of Microsoft's hat again? :) 2006 - Microsoft and Zend partner to "improve" PHP on IIS 2007 - mPHP developed by Microsoft, Zend cries foul, denounces partnership 2008 - Visual Studio .NET 2008 includes mPHP with .NET support *coughs*anotherdayanothernotch*coughs* Seriously though, it'll be interesting to see what new language mysteriously pops up the following year or two after this..

Win7K with Linux? I hope

[ancientt]

Let us freverently pray that Microsoft decides to use a Linux kernel. My dream is that one day Microsoft will be a support and add-on tools company instead of an OS company.

I have a dream. I dream of a world where Microsoft dropped all development on any new OS after Vista and redirected those efforts into porting software to Linux and building a Linux distribution.

People who use Microsoft use it because it:

1. Comes with their computer
2. Runs MS Office
3. Runs their other software
4. They can buy a contract to support it.

If Microsoft does Linux then:

• Linux will come with new computers
• People who like Office will be able to run it on the Linux distro of their choice
• New software will run on Linux and old software will be ported to it
• The people currently supporting only Windows will get Linux experience too.

As I lay down to sleep every night I whisper "Please let Microsoft adopt open source, Please let Microsoft adopt open source..."

apc's php5 support?

[phobonetik]

have you tried APC with PHP5 extensively? When I tried it some time ago (months) it crashed lots. Eaccelerator was better but not perfect (occasional but dramatic problems). Interested in knowing your thoughts.

Visual Studio support?

[edxwelch]

I wonder if they will add PHP support for Visual Studio.
This would allow step-by-step debugging of web applications created with PHP

Hi Hani!

[PHAEDRU5]

How's married life treating you? I haven't seen much out of the Bile Blog recently, but here's hoping!

Is the parent on crack?

[Anonymous Coward]

Ok I'll grant you that once you get PHP installed and configured on Windows is basically works. However having to use COM objects to connect to databases is just stupid. Especially since, it's not something that is even explained on php.net. As it stands now, I still use ASP if I have to do any scripting on an IIS box. Hopefully this deal will mean the actual database functions in PHP will work, and we can only hope the install process is made easier with fewer pitfalls.

You're Wrong. Be Quiet.

[shaneh0]

"There is not one company to have survived a partnership with Microsoft."

Please. This is asinine. You just don't remember the ones that weren't pushed out of the market because they're not interesting news stories that reinforce your personal stereotype.

How about these companies:

Apple
IBM
AltaVista
Tivo
Toshiba
Autodesk
Intel
WebTrends

And that's just the beginning. Microsoft is a huge multi-gazillion dollar business

Re:You're Wrong. Be Quiet.

[Anonymous Coward]

AltaVista is still around? Seriously. I used to use them for searching, but I thought they'd disappeared years ago.

captcha: astute

Re:Hooray for Microsoft Zend 2007, Ultimate Editio

[trezor]

Suuuuuuuuure. I'm absolutely certain Microsoft will kick out the technologically superior ASP.NET in favour of PHP which has stood exactly where it started ever since it's conception. Absolutely sure!

That was sarcasm, btw. Microsoft already did their own PHP, it was called "ASP" and was just as shitty as PHP was back then and is today. Maybe even a few tads worse. As a developer in MS-land, I say "Thank god they moved forward and ditched that POS". So just relax. I don't think they're going back there again. Your PHP will probably be safe.

Revelant old saying...

[certain death]

Keep you friends close, and your enemies closer... Why develop something when you can buy it... etc.

Don't know about Loki,

[Anonymous Coward]

but Boost go to great length to get their stuff to compile on various compilers, so that doesn't really help your argument.

MS as the reformed alcoholic

[Latent Heat]

I have a DLL that I use in waveform synthesis for a DSP class that compiled just fine on MS VS 6 on up through the .NET upgrades until we upgraded to VS 8.

It compiles but now burps up a bunch of warning messages about strcpy() being deprecated. Microsoft famously has used C-style unchecked string handling in Windows, making Windows the security bug patch-o-rama that it is today, so now Microsoft is on the wagon and insists that everyone, everywhere not use those unsafe C-style string routines.

So strcpy() is now "deprecated" -- like, says who? Has the standards body said that strcpy() is getting pulled out of C++, or is MS like the guy who is scolding all of the people they see with a drink?

Brainfuck, obviously

[Drinking Bleach]

All hail the one perfect language!

It's the law!

[Anonymous Coward]

The law of software gravity states:

* Producers of bad software attract one another.