I Still Won't Use IIS

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:

  1. There was no Kool-Aid®

  2. The drugs were in the bacon

    They were Beggin'® Strips

  3. I love bacon

  4. 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

Yes, I love jokes from 2001

.

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

Yes, I love incomprehensibly paraphrasing Danish miniserieses. Did you see Riget? h0bbel said that "jævler" is the Norwegian equivalent of the Swedish word "jävlar."

!"

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

reiserfs

drive, or have normal line endings

Yes, I know about DOS2UNIX. I have had to write my own DOS2UNIX script because I couldn't find one for the box I was on -- but shouldn't we stop the problem at its source?

.

7 Responses to I Still Won't Use IIS

  1. 15 Christian Mohn 1195063852

    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.

  2. 16 jmullan 1195069699

    h0bbel, you are correct about Microsoft delivering a lot of goodness, but you work for a company with a sufficient budget to fully buy in to their products.

  3. 17 Christian Mohn 1195070881

    Thats very true, which really gives us the freedom of choice to chose the product best suited for the job at hand.

  4. 23 Micah 1195319744

    "h0bbel, you are correct about Microsoft delivering a lot of goodness, but you work for a company with a sufficient budget to fully buy in to their products."

    I find the second half of your comment kind of interesting, you say that he works for a company that has the budget to buy what they need to meet the job, which I then assume means you work for a company which doesn't? Is that a driving factor into why you are open source in the first place?

    What makes one company have the money and one company not have the money? You work for "Gallery" which is open source, Mohn, I expect doesn't do open source and charges for his services.

    Which company has the money? Mohn's does.

    I'm not saying Open source can't make money, obviously people do, but seems like overall in general the income that comes in for Open Source projects is typically far less than those who are not.

    Does having money mean buying into Microsofts architecture is the best decision? Not necessarily, does not having a lot of money mean open source is the best option? Not necessarily. In my view buying into a structure that all works well together from a company that has no signs of going away makes pretty logical sense. Building a structure built around a bunch of random open source companies who could be around today and not tomorrow on the pure fact that they ended up running out of money seems pretty unsetteling if thousands of my customers are going to rely on my service.

    I think one of the nice things about MS is the fact that you can buy all these products that work together, that fact alone can save a company thousands of man hours and dollars.

    Either way you are definatly right that MS opening up a little bit is good and the open source working with MS is good. It benefits everyone in the long run. In the end you have to choose what works best for you, your clients and weigh the costs on both ends of the spectrum.

  5. 24 jmullan 1195362651

    Micah, I work for a university. We do not have unlimited budgets. Christian and I both volunteer for Gallery -- although I've been on sabbatical for a year in favor of school.

    Sometimes Microsoft does not provide the best tool for the job. My point is that other Microsoft tools (which might be the right one) might not play with or even talk to non-Microsoft tools (which may or may not be open source).

    My home environment is a mix of Microsoft, third-party, and open source products. I would like to retain the ability to choose. That's as far as the philosophy goes. At work I am forced to use OSX.

    This post was in response to a flurry of posts from the php community heralding fastcgi on IIS. Someone needs to be snarky about it, and that person is me, because I'm good at snarky.
    On the other hand, at the summit, representatives from Microsoft had some really good ideas to help Gallery get tested in Microsoft environments. When they follow through, I'll explain the nice things that they will have done.

  6. 25 Christian Mohn 1195423648

    Micah: I'm a big open source user. I use it for my own personal server(s) (mail, http etc). I contribute to both the Gallery and the Habari projects in one manner or another, thats not the thing. For my business needs I have yet to find anything that would replace Microsoft based solutions on a broad scale in my enterprise.

    The company I work for is a semi-large (by Norwegian standards) shipping company with very specific needs, and thats why we even use Lotus Domino for our mail and groupware needs. I'm not a complete MS head, I'm just in favor of using the tools that fits in any given setting. In my professional setting, Microsoft provides the best framework to enable the business needs of my employers. It's as simple as that.

  7. 987 SneakyWho_am_i 1229331707

    Hey, I use nothing but Open Source Software and my employer is slowly making the switch too. Using IIS on Windows 2000 has been a terrible mistake.

    And yes, Windows's unique shortcomings are too numerous for one mere mortal man to count... But IIS 6 is pretty cool. It's not slow, it's not insecure, and you don't have to restart it to load new config files (unlike Windows itself on the installation of new software, and unlike Apache httpd!)...

    I'd probably be able to live with IIS 7 when it's stable, but definitely avoid IIS 5 like _the_plage_.

    If any software should be bashed for its absurdly low quality let it be that disgusting and worthless joke of a browser, virus explorer!

Leave a Reply

About You