PHP & IIS working together even better?! Yes, it's possible. Zend, the PHP Company, today made public a beta of its next generation PHP web application server, in both a free community supported edition (Zend Server CE) and a commercial edition (Zend Server). Zend announced this week that it has opened a public beta of their new product called Zend Server. It's completely free for anyone to go download and try it out. Zend is really hoping for some good feedback to make this product the best it can be.
The great thing is that with the work that Microsoft and Zend have done together, IIS 7 now runs PHP on a par with Apache, very competitively, and there is more & more database connectivity as well, meaning PHP is really working quite well now on Windows server. And it's even easier to get going with PHP on Windows because these two products are using native MSI installers on Windows.
Zend Server is designed to be an all-in-one install to get setup quickly with PHP, Zend Framework, and a PHP optimizer (opcode cache, very much a necessity with dynamic languages like PHP). It also comes with an admin UI to configure PHP easily. It uses native installers for various operating systems, and is available for Windows, Mac OS X (the CE edition), and Linux (.deb, .rpm, or tarball).
There are two versions being released. The full Zend Server (which after Beta will be a commercial product, price to be announced), and Zend Server CE, which is a version completely free to use however you wish. The full Zend Server comes with the following additional features:
* Page Caching (based on URLs, no code changes necessary)
* Monitoring (email alerts on slow DB queries, broken code executions, etc.)
* Support & Hot Fixes (so PHP is always up-to-date)
If you are interested in trying out Zend Server for yourself, check out some of the following links:
* Learn more about Zend Server:
http://www.zend.com/products/server/* Download Zend Server (either edition) to try out in beta:
http://www.zend.com/products/server/downloads-all* Join the Zend Forums to discuss your experiences:
http://forums.zend.com/* Andi Gutmans (Zend's CEO and co-founder) blogs on Zend Server:
http://andigutmans.blogspot.com/