Microsoft Launches Free Web Software Eco-System

An anonymous reader writes "Microsoft, inspired perhaps by the ease of selecting and installing iPhone apps, has taken a similar approach to gather back market share of its IIS web server in a predominantly Apache/PHP market. 10 open source CMS, gallery, wiki, and blog tools were chosen to populate the eco-system, dubbed Web App Gallery. Developers must agree to principles and can now submit their PHP or .NET application for inclusion. Once an application is in the gallery, Windows users use Microsoft Web Platform Installer, released in a keynote at MIX this week, which inspects the the local system, and installs and configures dependencies like the IIS webserver, PHP, URL re-writers, and file permissions. Screenshots show this to be quite easy for the typical computer user. This could provide some real competition for WAMP and Linux shell install processes."

Comments

Re:Microsoft and what?

[qoncept]

You think this is a sign Microsoft is legitimately trying to reach out to the web community? Or is this just another attempt to grab server market share from Apache and the Linux community?

Um.. what's the difference? One thing I can promise you is that Microsoft, like any other company, does what it feels is in its best interest. ie, they aren't trying to do anyone a favor here, they're trying to make more money.

Re:Microsoft and what?

[Anonymous Coward]

It's not every day you see "Microsoft" and "Free" in the same headline.

Nonsense

Not needed for server apps

[saibot834]

Servers are maintained by people who are not computer newbies and need a GUI. Normally they know how to handle a shell.
Extremely ease install routines for server applications suggest that maintaining a server and keeping it secure is a trivial task, just like clicking those shiny "install" buttons. This is not the case, and you better know how to keep your server save if you run it on the web, especially if you make the somewhat disturbing choice to run it under Windows.

Re:Not needed for server apps

[MeanMF]

That may be true for larger sites, but there's a huge market for low-cost, turnkey web hosting usually fronted with cPanel or Plesk. Microsoft wants to get into that market.

Yeah, The App Store

[SuiteSisterMary]

Microsoft, inspired perhaps by the ease of selecting and installing iPhone apps

Yup. Cuz nobody's every thought about a package manager before. Especially not one with a nice, GUI front end.

Hey, maybe Microsoft will adopt something similar for the Xbox 360. You know, to make it easier to download add-ons, small games, videos, and so on. They could call it, I don't know, Xbox Live Marketplace or something. Too bad it's too late for them to have done it for the Xbox. Real shame that.

Re:Microsoft and what?

[gbjbaanb]

Of course with both WAMP and XAMPP taking about three minutes to install I'm not sure that will work

Ah but it will, Microsoft developers don't tend to look outside the box to see if there's anything else out there - they generally assume that MS provides all they would ever need, and if MS doesn't provide it, its either not available at all, or they never needed it anyway.

This is why this will succeed, the MS blogs and communities will pick up on it and suddenly they'll think its the best thing ever. I doubt they'll actually use much PHP, that's just the teaser to pre-populate the site with apps, they'll all get taken over with ASP.NET MVC stuff before too long -the MS crowd just don't like to install 'foreign' stuff like PHP when they will think nothing of installing over a gig of .net framework to start playing with C#.

So - I don't know if it'll work well either.

Re:Microsoft and what?

[Anonymous Coward]

It's not every day you see "Microsoft" and "Free" in the same headline.

Not "free" as in beer, "free" as in cheese in a mousetrap...