PHP SQL Server drivers, much improved IIS support for PHP - what is this world coming to!

by hjanssen on October 19, 2007 08:15pm

Yes I am still alive!

As I write this, I realize that I have been very delinquent with writing blogs. Time has gone by very fast, and I keep on working on more and more things. And before you know it, you look back and months have gone by without any blogs....

But I wanted to write a few things that have happened here in the last few months. As you might be aware, Microsoft has been working very hard on making PHP on Windows a premier experience. And working in the OSSL, my group and I find ourselves in the middle of most of these efforts. And it gives us a great view of the changes that are happening inside of Microsoft (Sometimes with a gentle shove from us  )

So, we assisted the IIS team with their FastCGI effort and GoLive release a few weeks ago. (https://www.iis.net/php ) And no less interesting, something that I am particularly proud of is that Microsoft has released a CTP (Community technical Preview) of a native PHP SQL server driver on Windows.

As a result, I was invited to speak at the PHP Zend conference that was held in San Francisco last week, (www.phpcon.com)  I have included the presentation for people to see what we talked about. John Bocharov from the SQL server team co-presented with me on stage and showed some of the bits that are now available for download.  You can download them directly from the Microsoft download site. (here is a super long URL with the download details and helpful hints for the driver; https://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=85F99A70-5DF5-4558-991F-8AEE8506833C&displaylang=en )

As part of the release, we at the OSSL converted phpbb (www.phpbb.com) to run with the native SQL server driver, and I showed phpbb running natively on SQL Server, on stage -  which was pretty cool.  We are currently cleaning those changes up and will be submitting them to phpbb code base. And....I am looking to see what other popular PHP applications out there we can contribute support to by writing code & integrating the driver.

All this shows a commitment from Microsoft that I am pretty excited to be a part of. I mean....an IIS 6 version of FasCGI with specific support for PHP, FastCGI build into Server 2008/IIS7 with PHP optimizations and now the SQL server driver for PHP on Windows!  

What is this world coming to! 

A note on the PHP driver, it is like I said - a community preview. Which means we are very much looking for your feedback on how to improve it, and any bugs you might encounter. So please participate as you can to make this the driver you would like to see it be.

Let's see...what else we have we been up to? We have been working with the Apache Software Foundation more, which has been a lot of fun. And in discussions with them to see how we could better work together, I supplied them with 75 MSDN licenses to help them develop on Windows. I am looking forward to continued cooperation with ASF on many different fronts.

The Lab continues to grow in both manpower and equipment, and we now have over 300 Servers to play with. From the old P3’s (very few still left) to the latest in IBM, DELL and HP Blade systems.

I will do my best to be more responsive and blog more. So keep the comments coming! Until the next time……………..
Thanks,
Hank.