Microsoft joins hands with Zend for better PHP on Windows servers
The alliance will ensure that PHP will run better on Windows servers past and future.
If you can’t beat them, join them! And that’s what Microsoft has decided to do. The Redmond Company has decided to change its stance against open source projects by partnering with Zend an open source software maker. Now this comes as pleasant shock, especially because Microsoft’s products are directly competing against Zend’s products.
According to reports a multi-year, multiphase partnership will ensure that PHP used by computer programmers to build open source web applications will run on past and future versions of Microsoft Windows web server software. PHP will also cover established Windows Server 2003 and the upcoming version, code-named Longhorn.
Andi Gutmans, Zend’s co-founder said, “PHP has always worked on Windows. The problem is that it never performed well”. Having said that, it is a well-known fact that PHP has always run faster on Linux servers than on Windows servers. Microsoft would want to change that fact once for all and give corporate software developers one more reason not to choose Linux. It remains to be seen how much will Microsoft succeed.
Zend is an Israeli-American company is situated in Cupertino, California. It was formed to commercialize PHP. The Zend family of products is a comprehensive platform for supporting the entire lifecycle of PHP applications. Andi Gutmans reveled that three-quarter of Zend PHP customers run applications on Windows. This will give an opportunity to people to bring PHP on Windows. Both the companies would make technical improvements to make PHP run on Windows computers easily, by way the of an active base of contributors. Microsoft will lend a direct access to Windows API’s to help I the development of an open source version of PHP for Windows. Zend will also establish a Windows testing lab and conduct regular tests and performance improvements to maintain high performance of PHP on the Windows Server platform as PHP evolves. The project would take off in early 2007.
What is PHP?
It is the most popular language used to build open source web applications. PHP runs some of the world's famous blogs and the Wikipedia. It is a 12 year old language which runs on more than 22 million websites worldwide and over 15,000 companies use it internally. PMP is one of the most important constituents of the so-called LAMP stack. LAMP is nothing but a collection of independently developed open-source software programs that when packaged together represent an alternative to Microsoft Windows for building complex business applications. LAMP stands for Linux operating system, Apache web server software, the MySQL database and PHP. Currently there are about 4.5 million software developers using PHP.
But why would Microsoft partner with Zend? Simple as it might sound it is a rearguard action to protect its server business. Because PHP runs much faster on the most popular web server, the open source Apache server, than on Windows machines and IIS. This has created problems for people to adopt Windows for many web development using PHP. Microsoft’s 23 percent revenue comes from its Server & Tools division. Microsoft’s revenue during the last quarter was $14 billion. That might give you an idea “why” the change in stance.
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