News

Zend Core PHP Certified for Windows Server 2008

• By Kurt Mackie
• 03/05/2008

Microsoft's CEO Steve Ballmer took time to note the importance of Microsoft's collaboration with Zend during the 2008 Launch Wave event in Los Angeles, which formally introduced Windows Server 2008, SQL Server 2008 and Visual Studio 2008.

"Today, we have the most popular platform on the planet for running PHP applications, which has a certain irony to it," Ballmer said. "But we're going to make sure Windows is going to be running applications not only on .NET, but also on the PHP environment."

In addition to the Zend Core certification, the two companies have been collaborating more broadly on shoring up performance and reliability issues between Zend's PHP solutions and Windows Server.

Other efforts include a FastCGI interface between PHP and Microsoft's IIS Web server. The companies are also collaborating on another Zend product, Zend Framework, to facilitate the exchange of digital identities using Microsoft's Windows CardSpace. They are also ensuring that the most popular PHP applications will run on Windows, according to an announcement issued by Zend.

Support for Windows Server 2008 is planned for Zend's entire product line, according to Andi Gutmans, Zend's CTO and Cofounder, in the announcement.

In a Redmond Developer News article on Windows Server, Gutmans explained that PHP used to perform "two to three times slower on Windows" as compared with other operating systems. "That was mainly because of years of neglect," he added.

The PHP scripting language is often associated with the open source LAMP stack. However, with Microsoft's Launch Wave of products and the Zend-Microsoft collaboration in place, a new stack may come to the fore, according to Forrester Senior Analyst Jeffrey Hammond.

"I think that as IIS7 comes into its own we'll be talking about a WISP [Windows 2008, IIS7, SQL Server 2008, PHP 5.x] stack as a realistic alternative to the LAMP stack these developers use today," Hammond stated.