Oleg's Blog

This is my translation of the "PHP on Windows" report from the Remix 2008 conference, that takes place these days in Moscow.

• Roman Zdevskyi, Microsoft
  
• Report "PHP on Windows"
  
• The main question — WHY???
  
• He shows a slide with a huge amount of the PHP applications on it
  
• Even slide with applications and solutions by MS
  
• The advantage is that this two separate worlds can be combined
  
• Shows the statistics where PHP seems to be far more popular than technologies by MS
  
• They're going to open the secret!
  
• Secret #1: MS knows there are browsers except IE
  
• Secret #2: MS knows there are platforms except microsoft's. (LAMP)
  
• Somebody think that MS treats LAMP badly. Not exactly.
  
• MS likes the idea of the glue scenarios
  
• He talks about how Microsoft opens standards, and enumerates the standards opened in the last year ...
  
• It's hard to switch between MS and LAMP technologies
  
• MS understands that cross-platform solutions is really important nowadays. That's why Silverlight works everywhere. ...
  
• MS works on the PHP driver for SQL Server
  
• They're going to demonstrate the driver
  
• They show the advantages of the driver towards the self-made one. Correct Unicode treatment, UID ...
  
• Then they shows an interesting slide where LAMP components (red background) are being replaced by the MS ones (the nice green background) ...
  
• There will be free edition of the MS SQL Server (hello, Oracle!)
  
• Express SQL Server will be limited by 1 Gb of RAM
  
• "Myth: MS hosting is more expensive"
  
• "Let's open the Masterhost website and compare the prices — see, they are the same!" (one hour ago they said that Masterhost is a certified MS partner) ...
  
• MS concluded an agreement with Zend, in order that the last will optimize Fast CGI
  
• "The PHP hosting possibility is just another additional scenario for the developer" ...
  
• IIS can configure PHP scripts with the help of plugins. Demo.
  
• IIS can generate PHP directly, and administrator can use graphical interface for it ...
  
• You can cache PHP on the server side. Demo.
  
• On the slide when they were replacing LAMP components, they've already replaced almost everything. There's now only PHP left on the top of the MS platform ...
  
• "Want to know how vital this systems are? Let's invite Sergey Rizhkov, the CEO of Bitrix here!" ...
  
• Rizhkov: "We're using different platforms, including Windows"
  
• Rizhkov: "The new Bitrix will have the configuration files, that will help it to work on Windows" ...
  
• The man from the SecurityLab is on scene
  
• SecurityLab: "People love to hack us. Every subscriber of the Hacker magazine think it's his duty to attack us" ...
  
• SecurityLab: "We choosed the MS platform and IIS server"
  
• SecurityLab: "IIS 6 was almost without any vulnerabilities, it was reliable"
  
• Slide: PHP applications are mixed with MS technologies
  
• "The main advantage is that you don't need to alter PHP code to make it work on our platform" ...
  
• "Myth: it's rather expensive to start with the MS platform"
  
• MS has a lot of free applications for the development: C#, VB, C++, Visual Web Developer, SQL
  
• Slide: "Adapted licensing"
  
• "There's the ability to pay only by the fact of usage" ...
  
• There's Nikolay Shifrin from Citrix on the scene
  
• Shifrin: "We offer Citrix Net Scaler. It reduces the load of the web-servers"
  
• (continues to advertise his product and invites people on the scene)
  
• "Citrix Net Scaler and our Firewall can protect even phpBB and Joomla"
  
• I've just noticed how they call the mix of LAMP components with MS technologies — "WISPA!"
  
• Shifrin leaved the scene and the demonstration of the IIS continues
  
• They show how easy it is to authorize users on the website with it's help ...
  
• Looks like they replaced the authorization through PHP with the ASP.NET one
  
• Everything's working, but they forgot the password. Another user has been created ...
  
• Everything turns out. The moral: PHP and ASP.NET could coexist peacefully
  
• Slides: "PHP on Windows — it's easy", "PHP on Windows — more possibilities"
  

Hmmmm... What do you think, ah?

As i've mentioned in the previous post: why should i use clumsy FF or Safary instead Opera when developing for web? This time the problem isn't in strong image caching. It's about error notification...

By the way, Opera error console is far more usable for me than the one in FF (even with FireBug extension). It gives me more info to think of and point to exact place in code that triggered an error/warning.

But today's thing with AJAX dissapointed me a bit... The error is next:

[Exception... "'Permission denied to call method XMLHttpRequest.open' when calling method: [nsIDOMEventListener::handleEvent]" nsresult: "0x8057001e (NS_ERROR_XPC_JS_THREW_STRING)" location: "<unknown>" data: no]

And there weren't any alert about this exception in Opera It just blocked my attempt of cross-domain scripting... quietly...

I'm using Safari for the development of this site for two reasons: first one — I like it much more than FF and the second is — he has the same problem that Opera does — it blocks my attempts (but the error is showed).