Microsoft and Zend Join Hands for PHP

Microsoft and open-source PHP in the same line? No this isn’t a typo—Redmond has actually announced that they’ve collaborated with Zend Technologies to optimize the performance of PHP on Windows! Zend Technologies is the company behind the massively open source web programming language PHP, the key developers of which are a part of Zend. It includes ’technical improvements’ to PHP which will be open sourced and a FastCGI component for better interfacing between PHP and IIS.

Microsoft has announced that they will work with Zend to develop a production quality PHP for IIS 6 as well as the upcoming IIS 7. They have also announced that they will actively participate in the PHP community’ to help developers deploy PHP applications on Windows.

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The adoption of PHP has grown faster than any other web programming language, thanks to its simplicity, power and versatility. Even before we decided to develop Tech2.com, we knew we’d be using PHP. Though the open source ‘LAMP’ system (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP) is kind of the de-facto standard on the web these days, a huge chunk of developers still use Windows (‘WAMP’) to code and test web applications before finally deploying them to Linux servers—we do the same. Offering better performance, stability and manageability on Windows (as compared to previous versions) can be an incentive for the developers to deploy on Windows as well.

Read more here. The optimized Technology Preview of the Zend Core for Windows is available for download from the Zend website.