Japanese LAMP Engineers Visit Redmond

by Peter Galli on March 10, 2009 04:30pm

I was fortunate enough to spend last Thursday with a group of LAMP engineers who have some experience with Windows Server and IIS, and who are based in Japan.

The three - Kimio Tanaka, the president of Museum IN Cloud; Junpei Hosoda, the president of Yokohama System Development; and Hajime Taira, with Hewlett-Packard Japan - won a competition organized by impress IT and designed to get competitive LAMP engineers to increase the volume of technical information around PHP/IIS and application compatibility. The competition was titled "Install Maniax 2008".

A total of 100 engineers were chosen to compete and seeded with Dell server hardware and the Windows Web Server 2008 operating system. They were then required to deploy Windows Server/IIS and make the Web Server accessible from the Internet. They also had to run popular PHP/Perl applications on IIS and publish technical documentation on how to configure those applications to run on IIS.

The three winners were chosen based on the number of ported applications on IIS, with the prize being a trip to Redmond.  A total of 71 applications out of the targeted 75 were ported onto IIS, of which 47 were newly ported to IIS, and related new "how to" documents were published to the Internet. Some 24 applications were also ported onto IIS based on existing "how to" documents.

The first-place winner Kimio Tanaka managed to port 71 applications onto a single IIS server. His technical documents can be found here.

Kentaro Yoshikawa, the Platform Strategy CSI Lead for Microsoft Japan, put the competition together and brought the winners to Redmond, where we arranged for them to meet with folk from the Windows Azure, Windows Server and IIS development teams. They also spent time with Sam Ramji, the Senior Director for Platform Strategy, as well as with Tom Hanrahan and Hank Janssen of the Open Source Technology Center.

Kentaro told me that the three were really impressed by the depth of the discussions they had during the day, which was useful to them as they have, until now, mostly lived outside of the traditional Microsoft ecosystem.

They also appreciated the depth of technical thought, strategy and commitment to open source communities that exists within not only the Platform Strategy group, but across Microsoft.