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Microsoft Releases IIS FastCGI Module
Marcy writes "Microsoft has just announced the final release of the IIS FastCGI module for IIS 5.1 (XP), 6 (2003), and 7 (2008). This FastCGI module was built with collaboration from Zend, the creators of PHP, and is intended to solve the CGI on Windows problem." It's free as in beer.
One thing I've been keeping an eye on is WPHP. It's only alpha-quality at the moment, but it's basically a WSGI application (WSGI is the standard Python web application interface) with a FastCGI backend that runs PHP. With something like this, you can mix and match PHP and Python — for example, you could write an authentication handler in Python and link it to a legacy PHP application.
Bogtha Bogtha Bogtha
Since when did Zend "create" PHP?
Actually, IIS does have text file configuration also - the metabase.
That's one thing I like about it - I can edit the text file OR use the GUI.
The caveat is the text-file is XML, the pro is that it's structure in such a way that it's not as painful to edit by hand as normal XML. Also, there's a log file in the same directory that produces really helpful error messages if you screw up editing it by hand.
Having used both, I find neither significantly better/easier to administrate. They are just different
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Connection too slow for X forwarding? Try "ssh -CX user@host"
That may be true in some respects, but all of my clients have Windows servers to some extent, and most have only Windows servers. To suggest that people would have to pay extra to set this up is a little silly. IIS is a component of Windows, so you get that for 'free' when you purchase whichever flavor of Windows server you choose. And yes, you are paying for the cost of IIS development somewhere in that Windows price, but when someone has the option of just turning on IIS on an underutilized box, or finding/buying a box to install linux and Apache on, the idea of price is a non-issue.
They already have IIS, and it takes 5 minutes to set it up. The cost of time alone on setting up a new box to run something else almost immediately negates the benefit in most IT manager's eyes when all they are seeing is consulting time to setup, manage, and maintain a linux box they know almost nothing about.
I will shred my adversaries. Pull their eyes out just enough to turn them towards their mewing, mutilated faces. Illyria
Most have a series of tabs/menus that allow a drill-down type search.
That's not useful. I don't want to have to "drill down", I want to search for a keyword. Say I've got several hosts, and I want to see everything specifically relating to an IP address. I search for the text of the IP address. For beginners looking to change one option, complex GUIs are a mass of buttons and tabs, rather than something they can search for.
Turn off the options you don't want - same way you would in a command line.
I don't want to turn them off, I want to remove all reference to them.
If the GUI attaches to the registry, export the hive and attach it.
That's not useful. I want to mail the config so someone can read it, eg. paste my config to a newsgroup to ask a question when I'm stuck. The usual equivalent in windows-land is you spend days searching for stuff and getting dumb meaningless error messages ("please check that the domain controller is both locatable and contactable" - hey I know, Mr Paperclip, why don't YOU tell ME whether it was either unlocatable or uncontactable or both..), then eventually you find the answer on someone smug bloke's blog with a mugshot of him in the corner and 1000s of thankyou messages, rather than anywhere on MSDN. (incidentally, that error was nothing to do with the server being unlocatable or contactable, but being windows, I couldn't do a trace on it to find out where it was breaking, I just had to click "OK" and try something else).
Yep, text-y configs you can't change things they don't give you options for either!
Text-y configs usually have some level of scriptability, eg. "IfDefined" in apache. Syntax that might apply to one feature will usually apply to all features, making things a lot more versatile.
Another advantage of text configuration is that you can arrange the order of the file according to what's important. You can also add comments.
I wrote my first program at the age of six, and I still can't work out how this website works.