Microsoft Partners With Zend 223
jesse.castro writes to point out news of Microsoft striking a multi-year partnership with PHP provider Zend to improve PHP's performance on Windows-based Web servers. From the article: "Rather than marking a sudden change of course, Microsoft is openly engaging in a dialogue with Zend, a key open source promoter, and millions of PHP developers, analysts said."
It's a trap ? (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:It's a trap ? (Score:4, Insightful)
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yer a nut!
If what you say is indeed true then this is the first time in some 20+ years that Microsoft is changing from Embrace/Extend/Extinguish to... Sorry, I don't believe it. There is not one company to have survived a partnership with Microsoft. In five years, if Zend is still Zend and PHP is still PHP and not some dot-net extension, you might have a point.
I view this as the end of Zend and the kiss of death to PHP. If PHP gets better under Windows then it will probably somehow get worse under Lin
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If it makes PHP better under windows, and adds support for PHP to tools like Visual Studio then all is good. The old PHP will continue to work as before.
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The only problem I can see will be if MS adds features to the language that Linux version doesn't have, and lots of developes start writing MS-PHP code in Visual Studio targetting IIS. However, all that will do is make people ensure that there is a clear distinction of the version of PHP that their code is written for - something that happens already with PHP4 and PHP5.
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You mean like Zend studio? [zend.com]
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In other news, I'm so terribly glad I migrated to Perl recently
Why are people freaking out? (Score:2, Interesting)
What does this mean for ASP though? Short an
"ASP?" C'mon, this is 2006... (Score:2)
(So, you're probably right; if you're still using ASP, not much is going to stop you now.)
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If PHP developers wanted "innovation", PHP wouldn't have succeeded as much as it did. PHP has succeeded because it's for people to develop web applications with, and to do so with little more than a text editor. It also doesn't look to me like PHP needs more support (and what kind support would Microsoft offer anyway?).
This is simply what it looks like: Microsoft wants PHP to run better on Windows servers so that
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Hmm... so much PHP hatred. I'm a little surprised here. Although, I cannot disagree with people's claim on how PHP gets used to pump out complete slop by new-to-programming people, what would be the open-source choice if not PHP?
The only other thing I can think of is JSP, which I started working with once, but soon grew a bit frustrated with trying to get it to work on Windows in a "WAMP" environment. I also found that it was just confusing to organize, and this comes from a programmer who spent most o
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And if you meant regular old ASP, well, don't use that, use PHP.
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This makes me happy. (Score:5, Interesting)
That said, this confuses me a bit:
Since when was it difficult to run PHP on Windows? I have written code that runs on both Linux and Windows machines, and, like most scripting languages, "it just works". There are a few extensions (like process control) that don't work under Windows - but the need for those extensions is very small. For a vast majority of scripting you don't need to do anything differently under Linux than you do Windows. I wish the article would have gone more in depth about these alleged problems.
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It says in the article:
'"PHP has always worked on Windows. The problem is that it never performed very well," Andi Gutmans, Zend's co-founder and chief technology officer, said in an interview'
It seems MS is looking to improve performance, not to get it working in the first place. Any performance gains on any platform is great news for the language.
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My gut is telling me that this is just to stop customer hemorrhaging. People say "We like PHP and that's what our code is in so we can't use Windows" or "... but Linux is faster" (just a guess). So MS is helping with PHP so people can either switch FROM Linux to Windows and easily keep/develop PHP, or just get better performance for their current code (if there is a very measurable performance hit from running Windows, they'd want that fixed).
Either way it's good, but that's my guess why they are doing thi
Alleged problems.. (Score:2)
Take this with a grain of
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I always thought it looked like Barney Rubble's hair, or a furry version of the Chargers logo...
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This makes me worry (Score:2)
Microsoft is notorious for not following set standards and instead doing what it think is right/better/best, causing the development community to work twice as hard to support it in some cases.
What worries me is that this will turn into some bastardization of PHP that is "tuned" for Windows and then requires hacks or work arounds to get things to work on other platforms.
What might actually be worse would be features that are only available in PHP running on Windows. *sigh*
Also, a little OT, I admit
Better then Visual BASIC or Access (Score:2)
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{
print "Unsupported operating system detected.";
print "To enjoy the full php experience please visit www.microsoft.com for an upgrade."
}
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PHP.NET is long overdue though, kudos MS!
It's more difficult than it should be (Score:2)
None
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Um... no. Oracle bought InnoDB and BDB (both separate projects from MySQL), two of the many backend formats that MySQL can use. It still has MyISAM and a few others, not to mention that Oracle hasn't bought MySQL itself or anything it owns.
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Err, no. Both PHP and MySQL have been pretty amateurish. They're getting better, and MySQL is a decent database today, but PHP still has a long way to go. I'd say their successes are mostly due to hype.
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Well, it depends what kind of justification you want. It seems you judge PHP and MySQL by who uses them. By that standard, indeed, they are doing well. However, I don't judge the quality of something by looking at who uses it, but by its qualities.
As a programming language, PHP is pretty wretched. It looks like a bunch of cobbled together functions with no consistency or underlying design. The scoping rule
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I agree and it irritates me daily too, but its still no reason to condemn the language any more than pythons use of whitespace to delimit blocks is a reason to condemn it.''
Oh, no. On it's own, PHP's odd scoping isn't a reason to reject the whole language. However, it is an annoying misfeature, and it doesn't scale to situations where you have multiple levels of scoping (which is a useful feature). All in all, I s
Makes sense (Score:2)
In other news... (Score:4, Funny)
drum roll
drum roll
PHP Sharp, or PHP# for short...
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Special MS PHP? (Score:5, Interesting)
C++ in Visual Studio is not exactly standards compliant. It's definitely Microsoft specific, as is their: HTML, CSS, XML, Java, TCP/IP stack, HTTP negotiation, LDAP, kerberos, DNS, DHCP, etc., etc. Every "standard" and language they adopt gets altered, even when completely unnecessary.
What on earth will they do to PHP? Assimilate it into
What PHP really needs is a MS SQL driver that doesn't leak memory and cause access violations. Microsoft hasn't supported their C library in years. PHP doesn't need any "help" from Microsoft, IMHO.
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Quite possibly. It's already been assimilated into Java [caucho.com]
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Do you have any idea what you're talking about? VC 8 is right on par with GCC 4.0 in terms of C++ '99 (and 2003 rev) compliance. Yes they have some extensions, but so does GCC and pretty much every other compiler out there. Hell, GCC probably has more extensions than VC does. Obviously if portability is a concern, you don't use vendor specific extensions -- regardless of what vendor it is.
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I'm not talking about vendor specific extensions, of which there are many. I'm talking about actual deviations from the C++ standard. Microsoft has made big strides, and this is the closest they've come so far to a truely standard C++ compiler, but VC8 st
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a match made in vulnerability hell (Score:3, Funny)
It could just be (Score:2)
This is an unexpected move. At OSS. (Score:2)
Desktop Linux hasn't caught on. Not yet. But PHP has. Like it or not, PHP has turned into the king of the server-side. MS must have noticed how much it's gnawing at ASPs marketshare (Just did a comment on that [slashdot.org] the other day). PHP even has turned into a brigdehead for Linux at this point. That they'd team up with Zend is an unexpected but somewhat fitting move.
I've never really known what to make of Zend. Their PHP groundwork is fair enough, but all-i
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Not quite yet.
From dice.com - one of the best known IT job sites.
Today, out of around 96,000 jobs:
Java or J2EE 16,777
ASP 3165
PHP 1216
Ruby on Rails 350
Yes, I know jobs aren't that accurate as a measure of technology use, and there are a lot of smaller PHP projects, and so on, but we are talking about a ratio of Java : PHP of more than 10:1.
PHP is very popular, and will remain so, but to claim it is 'king' of the server-side is wildly exaggerating
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Next Target (Score:2)
Oh god (Score:2, Interesting)
God no. They must be trying to destroy it.
Slashdot logic.
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A good thing (Score:4, Informative)
I for one would love to see
A bit of performance would be nice, but chances are I will keep running my servers on Debian simply because that's all they are: brainless webservers with muscle and nothing holding them back.
PHP is not GPLed (Score:2, Informative)
PHP is not licensed under the GPL. It comes with its own license, called "The PHP License" (3.0 in the sources I have here). Looks like a BSD-like license to me at a quick glance.
I vaguely remember PHP not being GPLed the reason that MySQL made an exception in their licensing of the database to allow PHP to work and talk with it (MySQL consider communication over TCP/IP as derivative work, IIRC).
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I thought it was Sun (Score:2)
but it still doesn't answer whether there will be windows only PHP extensions. Will it be another java type fiasco, this time with incompatible PHP's? I certainly hope not. If this is MS's way of screwing it up so badly that people say "screw PHP", kinda like MS did with CSS and IE, that would royally suck. Zend, and all PHP developers should be very wary.
EWeek already thinks WinPHP best (Score:2)
Pretty much, EWeek found that the OSS stacks run best on Windows. Now, is this because EWeek ran everything without tuning? Possibly. But then again, so do most folks, so the results are pretty valid.
I bet that someone at MS was reading that, too.
jh
w.i.m.p. (Score:2)
This is clearly their way to infiltrate the open source LAMP stack:
* W indows
* I nternet Information Server
* M S SQL
* P HP
Clearly, the acronym of the future
Time for a change? (Score:2)
A Quick, Painless Tutorial on the Python Language [ucdavis.edu]
No, this is not off topic. Friends don't let friends use Visual PHP#.net.
PR stunt (Score:2)
Of course, just my imho,
Peter.
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Ahhhh, Slashdot. (Score:2)
I make a post, and get modded -1, Troll. You agree with me, and get Insightful.
Ah well, enjoy it my friend! Such are the fortunes of Slashdot karma.
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Platform: Windows
Language: C#/PHP/VB
Library:
Framework:
I've been doing "WAMP" for years... (Score:2)
I like PHP for my toy applications, but I can see where something Zend would be needed if you wanted to something serious with PHP. (Same reason I'd only use "modperl" if I ever wrote another perl-based web app.)
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That reminds me, I've needed an excuse to learn one of those for a while now...
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Re:Hooray for Microsoft Zend 2007, Ultimate Editio (Score:2)
* Netscape [albion.com]
* Palm [redmondmag.com]
* Symantec and McAfee [physorg.com]
* Sendo [theregister.co.uk]
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I remember reading some interviews with companies whose technology had been "innovated" by Microsoft. One guy said (paraphrased), "It's a catch-22. If you partner with them, they get cheap access to your technology and take it from you. If you don't partner with them, they'll go to your c
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Big Freaking Deal (Score:3, Insightful)
The fact that you can pull it off of your apache box at the drop of a hat when righteous indignation strikes means you aren't using it for a single thing that is important. Am I supposed to be impressed that you're taking a stand by removing a product you're not really using?
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1. PHP has weird and impractical variable scoping (you have to explicitly indicate if you want to access a global variable from within a function)
2. The implementation as well as certain language features have been a rich source of vulnerabilities
3. Certain operations crash the interpreter (e.g. doing MySQL operations when mysqld is down)
Just from the top of my head.
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This is totally getting into sour territory, but I would add:
Have to agree (Score:2)
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Indeed it is (Score:2)
PHP is no [insert your favourite script language here], but like VB it does have its place. It could use a major overhaul, but the concept makes sense. (Also, PHP makes for a somewhat useful generic preprocessor. Not the prettiest s
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Despite your sarcasm, I would actually have to agree to some degree.
PHP is a hodge-podge of functions that lack much consistency (compare in_array(needle, haystack) with, say, strpos(haystack, needle)) and when coding a real site with classes and such you still have to code within the confines of "we're escaping out of HTML into PHP mode" with the <? and ?> tags in *every* file. This promotes and encourages combining display with log
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The whole pass by value thing was what drove me away permanently from PHP years ago, but I thought PHP fixed that behavior in PHP5. Am I mistaken?
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No, everything still defaults to pass by value. You have to declare your function like "function & foo(& $a)" to pass by reference and return by reference and assign the return value like "$bar =& foo($object);" to make sure $bar is by reference to what foo returns. If you miss any one of those three ampresands then you get pass by value.
This is why
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I could be wrong, but isn't that what the Alternative PHP Cache (APC) [php.net] extension is for? There's also Zend Cache, but that's a commercial product.
Zend Optimizer [zend.com] might be related. Although Zend Optimizer is free as in beer, it is not free as in speech, which may turn away open source purists.
As a
Hi Hani! (Score:2)
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The funny thing is that even with the current speed penalty PHP has become the second most popular web programming language on windows servers.
Market Share (Score:2)
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PHP has...no redeeming features.
George Bush vs a Rhesus Monkey (Score:2)
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"Hey, how come no one else is in costume today?"
"Oh, they all forgot. So what do you think of my costume?"
"Uh, it's pretty good. George Bush, right?"
She laughed. But no, I didn't ask her out.
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