Gena01 Blog

Firefox running slow

Thu, 11 Jun 2009 15:42:00 GMT

I noticed recently that my Firefox 3.0 was running quite slow on my home PC. I know that there's a ton of news about browsers fighting to be the fastest but I felt that my home Firefox was running slower than my work copy. After doing a quick scan over addons that I have setup at home I noticed that my list is a bit longer compared to the setup I have at work. I went and disabled a number of addons that I am not using on a regular basis and restarted Firefox. Wow, what a difference. It seems like Firefox is like 10x snappier than it used to be. I don't know exactly which addon caused the slow down and don't want to create speculation. If your Firefox feels a bit sluggish then it's definitely worthwhile to go through your addons and disable or uninstall the ones you are not using.

Note: Firefox also has a Safe Mode option that can also help if your Firefox is misbehaving or freaking out. It might also be something to look into to see just how fast things load and run without any extensions running.

Gena01

Google releases Page Speed addon for Firebug

Fri, 05 Jun 2009 02:28:21 GMT

Today Google officially announced and released a new Firefox/Firebug addon called Page Speed. When I saw the announcement I was curious and yet perplexed. It definitely sounded like a YSlow like plugin. After installing and playing with it for a bit I do have to say that it's trying to do something similar with a different perspective. It has it's own set of rules and adds some unique features. I do recommend you install this one along with YSlow.

See the full announcement here: http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2009/06/introducing-page-speed.html

P.S. One interesting point is that the above page gets quite a few "moderate" grade recommendations in order to improve performance.

Gena01

NYPHP: Taking the Zend Server Out For a Spin

Fri, 05 Jun 2009 02:08:46 GMT

Last tuesday NyPHP resumed monthly meetups. NyPHP doesn't disappoint with great presentations. This time they kicked things off the with a great presentation from Zend. Recently Zend released a new community product called Zend Server. Ed Kieltinski from Zend was here to give a tour of this new product as well as run some quick demos to show off some of the cool features. It seems like a great product.

Ed was showing off the commercial offering while explaining how much of the functionality is missing from the community version. You can find some of the demos in the posted videos on the zend site.

Find more information on Zend Server CE here: http://www.zend.com/community/zend-server-ce. There's a ton of resources including pdfs and videos.

Gena01

Oracle Instant Client 11g on Ubuntu

Mon, 04 May 2009 21:45:38 GMT

I know things have been quiet. I've been quite busy and I am also getting ready to share some things that I've been working on. One of the bigger things is looking at Ubuntu Server as a possible distro to use for our Linux servers. As you may already know that Oracle makes available Oracle Instant Client 11g as either RPM or zip package. Ubuntu being a debian based distro is out of luck. Also Oracle doesn't officially support debian or any debian based distro (which would explain the lack of binary packages). They do make 32-bit Oracle XE binaries available for Debian/Ubuntu ( http://www.oracle.com/technology/tech/linux/install/xe-on-kubuntu.html )?

So I tried to install things from .zip packages. The process is tedious and the files are all in one big directory which is totally different from RPM install/setup. Also shocking is the use of zip packages on Linux (and lack of symlink support in zip format). Another issue is that all those configure based scripts might not be able to handle the zip based installs. Also installing files from sources or zips kinda breaks the binary packagement rules. If you are still insistent on using ZIP packages here are updated notes from oracle: http://www.oracle.com/technology/pub/notes/technote_php_instant.html

So what do you do if Oracle won't release debian packages. The simple answer: build .deb(s) yourself. It's quite simple actually and works quite nicely. We will use a package called Alien. It's a great little tool that does binary package conversion.

Here's how:
1. Install libaio1 (this is now a requirement for Oracle 11g). you don't need it for Oracle 10g Instant Client:

Code:

apt-get install libaio1

2. Install alien:

Code:

apt-get install alien

3. Download the RPMs from here: http://www.oracle.com/technology/tech/oci/instantclient/index.html I usually grab grab the Basic, Devel and SqlPlus. (Basic Lite RPM doesn't work if you want to install Devel and/or SQLPlus).
4. Convert RPMs to .deb using alien:

Code:

alien oracle-instantclient11.1-basic-11.1.0.7.0-1.i386.rpm
alien oracle-instantclient11.1-devel-11.1.0.7.0-1.i386.rpm
alien oracle-instantclient11.1-sqlplus-11.1.0.7.0-1.i386.rpm

5. Install the debian packages:

Code:

dpkg -i oracle-instantclient11.1-basic_11.1.0.7.0-2_i386.deb oracle-instantclient11.1-devel_11.1.0.7.0-2_i386.deb oracle-instantclient11.1-sqlplus_11.1.0.7.0-2_i386.deb

6. And you are pretty much done.

Code:

aptitude search oracle
p cl-sql-oracle - CLSQL database backend, Oracle
p libmono-oracle1.0-cil - Mono Oracle library
p libmono-oracle2.0-cil - Mono Oracle library
i oracle-instantclient11.1-basic - Instant Client for Oracle Database 11g
i oracle-instantclient11.1-devel - Development headers for Instant Client.
i oracle-instantclient11.1-sqlplus - SQL*Plus for Instant Client.
p spamoracle - A statistical analysis spam filter based on Bayes' formula
p spamoracle-byte - A statistical analysis spam filter based on Bayes' formula

P.S. The added benefit is that "pear install pecl/oci8" works out of the box. Just hit enter at the prompt and you got yourself a working php oci8 binary module.

Enjoy,

Gena01

Blog update

Thu, 09 Apr 2009 16:39:02 GMT

Yesterday night I reinstalled the SMF software and reinstalled some of the packages that I am using. I also replaced some of the packages with hopefully better alternatives. As a result the URLs that the forum was generating were changed. I noticed in Google Reader this morning 20 new entries for the Blog. The reason is that since the URLs are slightly different now RSS readers think that those are new items.

The old links should work as well and redirect you to the new location(s).

Thank you,

Gena01

Testers wanted for upcoming release of PHP Pecl 1.3.5

Mon, 16 Mar 2009 15:34:40 GMT

Last week Christopher Jones from Oracle pinged me about a patch I submitted a while back. The patch enables basic Oracle Instant Client detection during configure stage. The patch was meant to simplify install/upgrade of Pecl OCI8 module. After a number of revisions and improvements we have a working test version that will become OCI8 1.3.5.

Christopher also posted a number of blog entries on the changes:

This should also really simplify the installation/upgrade process if you are using "pear install pecl/oci8". It should basically install without requiring any user intervention if your Oracle environment is setup properly.

Update #1: Pecl OCI8 1.3.5 is released: http://pecl.php.net/package/oci8

Update #2: Christopher Jones posted more articles on the topic:

Gena01

Firebug Screencast

Wed, 04 Feb 2009 16:55:13 GMT

Vlad Didenko has posted a really nice Firebug Screencast. It's a ten minute quicktime movie that you need to download. The screencast covers a lot of great functionality of Firebug within a very short time.

He shows some really cool and time saving tricks like:
- Inspect Element.
- Going through the Firebug user interface and options.
- Doing JavaScript debugging and using conditional breakpoints.
- and many many more...

I highly recommend it to any web developer using Firebug.

P.S. Vlad also has other great content on his blog. Another article worth reading is: JavaScript meetup presentation. He is also an organizer of JavaScript User Group in Chicago.

Gena01

NYPHP: OWASP and Joomla

Sat, 31 Jan 2009 04:06:54 GMT

On Tuesday we had our first NYPHP user group meeting of 2009. We also had quite a turnout with many many fresh faces.

The user group meeting consisted of two presentations. The first one which ran for about 15 minutes was about OWASP. It was mostly general stuff about the organization and the projects that OWASP is involved in. I would have loved some more PHP specific material. For those who never heard of OWASP before it's a huge organization that covers various technologies. They also mentioned OWASP NYC AppSec 2008 Conference that ran in September of 2008. There is a ton of content posted from the conference including videos.

The second part of the user group meeting was the reason behind the meeting. The presenter is co-founder of Joomla. He started off with the "State of Joomla" and some history. After that he delved into how he got involved in Joomla and the project that he was involved in. He also mentioned the challenges that he and his team ran into and the strength of Joomla at solving some of these challenges. I was also impressed with the way the speaker covered the material with jokes, examples and stories. There was a lot of great content and questions.

I am waiting for the slides get posted so that those who missed the meeting will be able to see what they missed. Overall a great meeting that ran late.

P.S. I took a look and played a bit with Joomla. It seems like a great project to use and be involved in. I will definitely spend more time to see what it's all about and see what crazy things you can do with it. It also provides a rich and professional interface that's easy to customize with hundreds of extensions. Also looking through the documentation adding new views is a matter of writing a couple of files and is something that could be accomplished within an hour or so.

Gena01

RSS Part 2: do you check your own RSS feeds?

Wed, 14 Jan 2009 17:13:34 GMT

So i've been using Google Reader for some time now. It has been quite a learning experience. It also has been quite positive and a lot better than the days of having a ton of tabs open and trying to stay on top of all the great stuff happening in the blogosphere.

A couple of observations though:
1. Some sites do not provide RSS feeds at all (which is a pity).
2. Feedburner is great for many many reasons. Some of these include:
a. It takes over delivering most of the traffic (offloading your server) and caching the RSS feed.
b. It's able to convert and make sure that the delivered content is valid for many various RSS readers.
c. It provides a great way to analyze your RSS feed subscriptions and track articles.
d. It allows you to add links to each RSS post to make it easier to spread the word about the great stuff you are sharing through RSS feed.
e. You can combine FeedBurner with Adsense to get the benefits of both products.
3. Some sites that do provide RSS feeds do not provide full content to the article right in the feed and expect others to click on the link to read the full article. However it's not always obvious from the RSS item that the article is not complete and that there's more to it than what I am seeing in Google Reader. This one is quite annoying. I would love to see full content in the RSS feed. I would love to know that the article is a summary or a partial content that will continue once I follow the link. This is not obvious and I tend to play a guessing game of whether this is all the author wanted to say or there's actually a more detailed article.

If you run a site or a blog that provides RSS feeds do "eat your own dogfood" (check your own feeds) and see if there's anything that could be confusing or broken. Also don't forget to validate your RSS feeds. There's also a number of RSS validators. I would recommend to use more than one just to make sure that you have your feed covered and didn't miss anything.

P.S. I also wanted to mention BetaNews/Fileforum RSS feeds. BetaNews and Fileforum just went through a full redesign. They also provide RSS feeds. However the content in the actual feed is useless. There's a ton of stuff posted and the requirement to click and open each one defeats the purpose of using RSS altogether since I still need to open up each item in a separate tab/window just to see more information about the new item or program release. On a separate note it looks like the "Changelog" that was so useful when trying to stay on top of software releases is totally missing in the new design of the website. So if you are curious to see what changed you need to research that somewhere else.

See Also: RSS feeds and what you should know about them.

Gena01

Firebug 1.3.0 is out

Thu, 08 Jan 2009 16:58:50 GMT

Firebug 1.3.0 was released recently and it's highly recommended for anybody running Firefox 3.0.x. This is also quite a big release with a lot of changes and other effort that went into it. It also introduces some nice stuff and has some components redone completely. One of the most notable is the Net panel rewrite.

Read more about the changes here: Firebug 1.3.0 Final Released.

Gena01

My Pear DB fork.

Wed, 07 Jan 2009 17:09:56 GMT

We use PEAR DB extensively in our code (for my day job) and switching over to another abstraction library is too much hassle at the moment. We are also still in the migration phase from PHP4 to PHP5. (Yes I know PHP4 is dead and PHP5 rocks) One of the challenges that we faced was the fact that Pear DB generates a ton of warnings when running in PHP5 and it's also pretty much obsolete/abandoned. Which is a good thing for me, since I don't need to worry about having to merge different trees. I am currently focusing my efforts on db.php and the pear db oci8 driver implementation. I also added some new code to speed up Pear DB a little.

A couple of items that were fixed already:
+ Added a PHP version check to reduce the warnings and call the right function for the right version of PHP (4 vs 5).
+ Added oci8 implementation functions for GetCol(), GetAll() and GetAssoc() which use the oci8 ocifetchstatement() function to fetch rows in batches. 1 function call vs 2* N rows. The difference is huge if you are fetching 200-300 rows.

Things still looking at:
- There's a default pre-fetch that was introduced and somehow it's set at 400? That seems quite large. PHP oci8 module actually sets it to 100 by default. It's also set every time before fetching the rows. I am still pondering if we need another default in Pear DB driver.

Gena01

Firefox 3.0.4 and Firebug

Thu, 20 Nov 2008 21:05:40 GMT

If you have installed Firefox 3.0.4 update and have Firebug installed then you might have notices some problems after the 3.0.4 update. Personally I've seen tabs spinning endlessly and a couple of other quirks on two different PCs. I wasn't quite sure if it was related to Firebug up until recently.

First of all 3.0.4 is not just a minor release. This update included some fixes that were supposed to make Firebug integrate better. It seems that there was some bugs in on the firebug side. Firebug developers have been busy trying to implement a nice and clean solution to the problem(s). I've been testing some alpha builds that are supposed to make some things better.

Hopefully these problems should be resolved soon. I'll try to update things once I have a nice and stable environment again with a build recommendation. I am sure firebug developers will also make their own announcement with the recommended build to use with FF 3.0.4.

Update: Firebug 1.4.0a6 build is running great so far.
Update #2: We are not out of the woods yet. I have found another bug with Firebug 1.4.0a6. This one is related to file downloads.
Update #3: Firebug 1.4.0a7 is out that addresses the file download bug among another things.
Update #4: Firebug team has started a blog: http://blog.getfirebug.com/

Gena01

NyPHP and NyMySQL meetings

Wed, 19 Nov 2008 03:50:33 GMT

Things have been busy. We actually had two presentations/meetings last week (Tues and Wed).

On Tues we had the honor of Giuseppe Maxia presenting about MySQL Proxy. [Slides]

On Wed we had the honor of Duleepa Wijayawardhana a.k.a Dups presenting about High Performance Social Applications with PHP/MySQL.

For me it was an honor to meet both speakers and have a chance to bug them about various things. Both nights the room was packed. It was nice to see such a big turn up and to see people interested in what these speakers had to share.

It was also nice to meet Dups and congratulate him on his new position at Sun/MySQL. For those who don't know Dups is trying to fill the shoes of Jay Pipes.

Some interesting points from both presentations:
- people have infrastructure and scalability problems.
- there's way more questions than answers.
- Giuseppe's blog is something that I highly recommend. There's a ton of knowledge and information there.
- you should NOT use MySQL Proxy in production. (repeated by Giuseppe a number of times during his talk)
- MySQL 5.1 should be out before Christmas? Actually Dec 6?
- You can load balance databases (not just Web Servers). Take a look at SQLRelay as one possible option.
- There's already a MemCached client implementation in Lua. You should be able to use this with MySQL Proxy.

Gena01

RSS feeds and what you should know about them

Sun, 16 Nov 2008 05:53:05 GMT

For the last couple of weeks I've been using Google Reader. I do have to give credit to a co-worker of mine who told me that using RSS is way better than keeping a ton of tabs open and trying to stay on top of things. It's something that I tried to stay away from before. Now on the other hand I feel that I am on top of things. I also have to admit that using RSS reader is quite neat. Another neat benefit is using it to bookmark feeds. Also Google Reader supports OPML format for importing and exporting feeds you are subscribed to. I know that there's a ton of RSS readers out there, but for now I am sticking with Google Reader.

I have also spent some time looking at the RSS 2.0 specs and making sure that my website produces proper feeds and provides a usable and friendly experience.

Right now there's two RSS feeds on my website: News and Blog. There's something about "eating your own dog food". I had to make some tweaks and corrections to get things to work better.

News Feed:

News feed has been redone from scratch using PHP5 DOM XML Api. It was quite an educational experience. I'll try to post up my learnings in a separate blog entry.

Blog Feed:

The blog feed is based on the existing API from SMF. Actually they are documented, but you do need to make some decisions and corrections in order for it to do the right thing. Here is the link to a whole thread discussing various options that SMF makes available.

Some things to keep in mind:
- SMF is actually quite slow if you produce a feed that covers a large number of topics/items.
- You need to tweak a setting to make sure that the whole content is included in the RSS feed. Otherwise you only get a portion of the text.
- You need to select the right option to make sure that RSS produced is the news feed that you want.
- The way SMF allows you to produce RSS feeds has it's problems and limitations.

Update: Microsoft has posted Windows RSS Publisher's Guide.

Last recommendation i want to make is do test the feeds and content that you publish on your website.

Gena01

General Update

Sat, 25 Oct 2008 01:33:31 GMT

I know things have been quiet and I haven't posted much (even though I do have a ton of ideas and stuff to post). Some things have kept me busy and i'll do my best to post them.

Here are some of the items that have been happening:
1. Site had some problems from Oct 16-22. Took me some time to figure out that there was a problem and get it addressed. Somehow it was related to some security updates that resulted in some options getting turned off. I do apologize for the inconvenience and will try to keep a better eye on things.
2. I've been working on the Yahoo protocol code again for Miranda. I've updated code to support Yahoo 9.0 protocol. It runs rather stable now and has some nice new features (you can IM your Live, LCS and Sametime contacts now, no more disconnects, better avatar support, improved ignore options, redone the options configuration for Yahoo). Build 24 should be quite exciting once it's out.
3. I've been trying to stay on top of the news. One of our SysAdmins managed to convince me to start using Google Reader to keep track of things as well as mark the interesting items for future reference.
4. I've been trying to follow MySQL and Drizzle. Lots of cool stuff happening there. 5.0.67 has a ton of fixes. Took me some time to go through the list. 5.1 is not out yet. 6.0 is feature frozen. What does that mean? Stuff gets pushed after 6.0 release....
5. I've been looking into Oracle 11g and it's feature set. Some interesting stuff happening there too... and as always Oracle wants an arm and a leg for something that others give you out of the box for free.

Gena01

Internet Explorer 8 Beta 2 First Impression

Thu, 02 Oct 2008 03:10:43 GMT

So I've been running Internet Explorer 8 Beta 2 for a few days now. Overall it's much much better than Internet Explorer 7.

Download is about 15megs, installation is nice and quick. One reboot does it. And what a difference. You will need to uninstall Microsoft Developer Toolbar if you got it installed now.

A couple of notes:
- I love integrated developer tools (lots of stuff copied from Firebug). However the UI is quite unpolished. The tabs look rather huge. CSS editor only allows edit, delete or enable/disable. It's also very very buggy and quirky. No idea how to add new CSS styles. No right click menus. Had to edit style names and values. You can set a value to an empty string and then you can't edit the value again. When editing the style name and scrolling the mouse wheel the page scrolls but the edit box just sits there. Also clicking around in the edit mode is buggy too. I also miss the right click menu. When going to CSS tab it shows up as a huge and unmanageable tree. I actually love how Firebug shows CSS as text with comments. IE8 shows a tree with checkboxes. I do love the current rendering mode and browser settings right in the menu bar of developer tools. It does reload the page if you change the settings, but it makes things a lot easier to test. With one menu click you can test things with IE7 vs IE8 rendering and standards vs quirks mode.
- I love the new address bar search. It's very very neat and makes things so much easier to find. I know Firefox uses it's own system but there's no clear separation between groups/categories of matches in Firefox. IE8 actually makes it so much cleaner.
- I love the colorful tabs. Makes things so much easier to follow. Esp if you need to know which tabs relate to other pages. And I do tend to open up a ton of tabs.
- InPrivate mode - this one is becoming rather popular lately. Took a quick spin and looks quite neat. Need to run some more tests. It opens a separate window that has InPrivate label next to the address bar.
- And the last and most important: standards mode rendering. - I haven't had much time to test this one out, but no real problems with rendering pages either. Also I would like to say that it's too early for the final verdict since I only been using it for a few days now. I know I am not going back to IE7 though.

So, there you have a quick review... I'll try to test and stress it a bit more over the next few weeks and do a more detailed write up. I do have to say that it's very stable for me. I had one crash and IE8 managed to restore the tab exactly where things should have been before the crash.

UPDATE: Actually after playing a bit with it I am changing my mind about recommending it to web developers. It seems that JavaScript debugger that's built into Developer Tools is a bit buggy and quirky. Also I can't launch the external debugger that worked in IE6 and 7. I checked my settings and tried a few different options. I can not debug JavaScript using MSE.EXE. I can't even open MSE.EXE or any external debugger from IE8 Beta 2. Be warned!

Gena01

OpenDNS and why should you care?

Sat, 27 Sep 2008 17:48:01 GMT

A few days ago I heard our SysAdmins (SAs) talking and one mentioning OpenDNS. This resulted in a whole Q & A session that went something like this.

Q: What is OpenDNS?
A: OpenDNS is open and free DNS service. Anybody can use it, and they are not required to register.

Q: DNS? What for I already got one from my ISP?
A: This one is a lot better.

Q: How so?
A: Well first of all it's a lot faster. Second it protects you and your family from viruses and phishing attacks. Third it can filter out sites and suggest URLs if you mistype a URL.

The setup of OpenDNS is quite simple and the site has a ton of visual instructions to get you started. You can set it up on your local computer or for your home network so that the rest of the family will transparently enjoy the benefits of this service. If you register an account you can also enable filters and block out a lot of sites that you think that are inappropriate. And your internet will work a bit faster.

These are only some of the great features that it provides and I highly recommend it . There's really not a single reason I can come up with for you not to use it. I started using it myself the same day I heard of it (and so have millions of others).

Gena01

Internet Explorer 8 Beta 2

Sat, 27 Sep 2008 16:50:41 GMT

So I took a plunge today and installed Internet Explorer 8 Beta 2 onto my home PC today. For some time now I wanted to take it for a spin. The final decision was based on a recommendation by Peter Laudati from Microsoft who said he is using it on a daily basis and it's running great. Peter gave a presentation during the last NyPHP meeting. I don't use Internet Explorer for anything critical anyway, so I thought that I got nothing to lose by installing the new beta release. Also I wanted to play with the new Developer tools and other new functionality that I was reading about on the IE Blog. If you haven't visited the IE team blog in a while then you are in for a treat. The team keeps posting a ton of stuff regularly.

Gena01

Virtualization with VirtualPC and Microsoft VPC images available for download

Fri, 26 Sep 2008 03:53:33 GMT

One of the items that got raised during the last NYPHP user group meeting was VirtualPC. Unless you have been hiding under a rock or just not following the technology sector then you would not know about all the hype about virtualization. This is not a new technology, but something that became quite popular. The idea is based on running a piece of software that emulates a piece of hardware to run another Operating System. In other words if you run Windows as your desktop environment then while you are in Windows you can run other Operating Systems in a window/sandbox. Also if you have plenty of available resources you can run more than one instance at a time. This solves one big issue: not needing more hardware. The hardware box is emulated inside your computer. This is now quite common in the enterprises today. They are trying to consolidate their hardware and virtualize as many of their servers as they can to save on energy and hardware costs. So if you are not an enterprise, then why should you care?

Well one big reason is that Microsoft provides VPC images of different Internet Explorer versions that you can download and use for free. You can download all the VPC images and just start the right one to test your site with. You will see exactly how your site renders in particular version of Internet Explorer without having to mess with your current Windows installation. Also running multiple versions of Internet Explorer is something that Microsoft strongly discourages. Another great reason is for setting up a quick Linux development server to experiment with. I was actually playing with Ubuntu server edition which provides a complete LAMP installation in <15 mins.

Here are some links to get you started:

Gena01

NYPHP meeting: WISP or Why a PHP Developer Should Care About Microsoft

Fri, 26 Sep 2008 02:53:52 GMT

NYPHP user group has resumed regular monthly meetings after the summer break. This was a very interesting and unusual presentation. It's also something that I almost missed. (I am so glad I didn't.)

I was quite skeptical about Microsoft trying to pitch their platform to the PHP community. Somehow when developing and rolling out PHP code Windows platform is not something that's at the top of the list of contenders. This is something that Microsoft wants to change. Microsoft is spending money and resources to make it happen. That's quite a change of perspective towards Open Source.

This was a great presentation that covered FastCGI support on IIS, SQL Server driver implementation and Silverlight. It also included demos of configuring and running PHP on IIS server using FastCGI. There were also a lot of audience questions on various topics (most of which were unrelated to PHP). Microsoft has also stepped forward and joined various Open Source groups and is contributing and releasing code under Open Source license.

So what is WISP? Lately there's quite a few four letter acronyms being used on the web. Some of the more common are:

LAMP - this one is probably the most popular. Linux Apache MySQL PHP. Some people claim that it's Perl vs PHP.
LAPP - Linux Apache PosgreSQL PHP.
OLAP - Oracle Linux Apache PHP.
WISP -Windows IIS SQL Server PHP.

I am sure that there are others. These are the most common ones I've run into.

Quite a few developers develop code on Windows platform and then deploy that code onto their Unix/Linux servers. The reasons why Windows was not considered included concerns about performance, stability and security. Running PHP scripts through the CGI interface is not a viable option for high traffic sites. Using Apache or IIS module on Windows platform has it's own stability implications. Some years ago another standard has emerged and has replaced the old CGI interface. This new standard is FastCGI. FastCGI is being used as an alternative to native web server modules for various programming languages. For some alternatives to Apache it's also the only option.

A couple of months ago Microsoft has released their own FastCGI implementation for IIS servers. You need to have IIS6 and above in order to take advantage of this module. The benefit is that by implementing this module you get better stability and performance than you could before. It's also a product that Microsoft officially supports. To get more information go to http://www.iis.net/php There you will find a lot of information, articles, tutorials, downloads and support forum for all issues related to running PHP on IIS server.

Microsoft has also released SQL Server driver a few months ago. Until that time there was no official SQL Server driver that one could use to connect and work with SQL Server from PHP. There were a number of third party implementations that people had to use. It's great to see Microsoft releasing a driver for PHP. I am sure it provides great support for Windows and SQL Server (both are Microsoft products). I am also quite positive that it's more stable and provides better performance than some of the third party alternatives. Microsoft has also released code to ADODB project to provide better integration with their SQL Server driver.

Overall a great presentation. I am still waiting for the presenter (Peter Laudati) to post the slides on his site. I also want to thank him for sharing a lot of great information. This presentation ended quite late and people didn't want to leave. There were also a lot of great prizes courtesy of Microsoft. All of the attendees got a copy of Visual Studio 2008 Professional Edition. Microsoft also sponsored food and drinks at TGIF after the presentation.

I am glad to see Microsoft stepping in and trying to convince developers to embrace their platform. I am sure that there's still a lot of great stuff to come. As a PHP developer I would love to know that PHP runs just as well on Windows as it does on other platforms. It's also nice to see that Microsoft cares.

Gena01