Microsoft and Zend announce Technical Partnership: Enhancing PHP on Windows
The Zend/PHP Conference & Expo is going on this week out in San Jose, California. Bill Hilf, from the Microsoft open-source labs, announced this morning at the keynote that Microsoft & Zend are working together to enhance PHP on Windows. That's right, you read that correctly! Microsoft & Zend will be working together on making PHP run better on Windows. Actually, they've already been working together on it the past six months.
According to Zend, the majority of PHP developers (70%) develop on Windows. It only makes sense that Microsoft should ensure that Windows is a great choice for deploying those applications.
At BarCamp NYC earlier this month, I led a discussion on Microsoft and open-source. I posed the question there, "do they really have to be like oil and water?" I know the relationship between Microsoft and the open-source community hasn't always been a good one. But I think the answer to that question oughta be a resounding "no".
I posted last week about how the new Microsoft AJAX Library can be used by PHP developers to add AJAX functionality to their web applications. The work Microsoft and Zend will be doing together focuses on improving the performance and integration of PHP on Internet Information Server (IIS). These are two examples of how Microsoft is able to provide value to developers in the open-source community.
Check out Port25 (the Microsoft open-source lab's blog) for more information about the work the two companies will be doing together.
[Updated:] Check out Bill Staple's post on the IIS.NET blog which walks folks through the demo he did during the keynote at the PHP conference.
