The constant joke about the Microsoft Web Development Technology Summit was that they were spiking the Kool-Aid® with mind control drugs. There is direct evidence to the contrary:
- There was no Kool-Aid®
- The drugs were in the bacon
They were Beggin'® Strips - I love bacon
- Microsoft is totally amazing and great for open source and doesn't have anything to prove to anyone so why would they use mind control anyway? Yay Microsoft!
With that bit of sass out of the way, I'll get to the meat of the issue: apparently Microsoft finally supports a fastcgi implementation for IIS. PHP via ISAPI has issues (thread safety? stability?). PHP via regular cgi has other issues (loading the entire PHP stack with every request?), but now you can finally run PHP at a decent rate on your IIS server. This is all predicated on the notion that you have access to an IIS server. Then again, if you don't, you can pluck one from the bounty of the internet via a buffer overflow exploit
Perhaps it's unfair to take potshots at Microsoft. Anything that they can do to open up their software to interoperation is a good thing. If I could do web development on my desktop machine with really good native Windows apps I would rejoice, because I like the interface. However, that's about the only thing that I like about Windows: the crude and sometimes brutal interface. I like the bleak squareness of Win2k, it's the Eastern Europe of operating systems.
Why would anyone choose IIS? That's a tougher question to answer. I've worked in a pile of computing environments: mainframes, windows, and various flavors of *NIX. Until this job at the University, I wasn't writing software -- I was trapped in userland doing actual work. There I had no choice -- I just had to screen scrape, write VBA, or sneak little perl scripts in to hammer data into compliance.
Therein lies my prejudice: I want to be able to sneak in those perl scripts, and I don't want to have to rewrite them for each place that I use them. I don't want to deal with things like the registry, which requires extra tools to back up.
sudo scp -r /etc user@newbox:/oldbox/
The registry is a great idea, but it represents the Microsoft Way: buy in completely to our philosophy or get bent. They finally wrote a new shell for Windows (the Powershell), which sounds completely cool and interesting, but isn't what I wanted: a native bash. I have cygwin, but if I want a shell, I ssh to my linux box. On second thought, I don't have cygwin, because when I built a new computer I figured that it would be easier to reinstall Windows on a new drive than figure out how to make Old Windows talk to New Hardware.
Maybe that's more complicated than it needs to be, and maybe it is not complicated enough. All I know is that I completely understand the urge to stand on the roof and scream in Swedish "Microsoftjävlar
Nonetheless, I envy Visual Studio, and my experiences with MSSQL Server were outstanding. I even enjoyed the heck out of Microsoft Access (when not using it as a database engine, but rather a front end to MSSQL Server). I understand that ActiveDirectory is pretty cool. Once you buy in to one of these technologies, it can be easier to just buy the next piece that already knows how to talk to your first piece than to build some sort of fragile and magical connector. You've already got a box running IIS that handles some custom .NET app that fulfills your business requirements and want to extend it to handle a bit of PHP on the side? Now you can do so with a clear conscience.
I dunno, fastcgi seems kind of a non-announcement. How about letting me maximize my shell window, mount an NFS drive, read and write my ext3 or murderfs
Christian Mohn
Thats where we come from different places. By profession I manage servers and desktops, and for me Microsoft clearly makes the best platform for my business clients. They get tools they know how to use, I get a network of computers that I can easily manage. Active Directory is great for that, and it does it well. Group Policy and patch management etc. makes me sane. If I would have to manage the same amount of linux servers/desktop, I most likely would have lost my mind a long time ago.
As you clearly say, you are prejudiced thats just the way it is. I don't think I am though, although the thought of running my own desktop computers on Linux as far fetched, even for me.
As for FastCGI and IIS, I really do think it is news. Why? Well, this is one of the first times Microsoft has embraced something we both love; Open Source software. While I don't for one second think that Microsoft is going to be a driving force in the open source arena, but the fact that they are actively trying to enhance their products to support open source applications like PHP is a good thing. It's good for Microsoft and it's good for the open source community at large.
If everyone could put their own little soapboxes to rest for a while and I think most everyone would see that this is a good thing.
November 14, 2007 10:10am