Microsoft and PHP??

[Blaze]

I think the reason it ran so badly was because of Windows, not PHP.

SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - Microsoft Corp. and Zend, a key supplier of tools used to design open-source software that competes with Microsoft Windows programs, said on Tuesday the two companies have struck a long-term partnership.

Bill Hilf, a Microsoft technical strategist, said the Zend deal, a multiyear, multiphase partnership, will ensure PHP programs run on past and future versions of Microsoft Web server software. The pact covers both the established Windows Server 2003 and the upcoming version, code-named Longhorn.

Zend Technologies is an Israeli-American company formed to commercialize PHP, the most popular scripting language used by software programmers to build open source Web applications that pose a growing challenge to Microsoft's Windows franchise. PHP runs some of the world's most popular blogs and the Wikipedia.

"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.

Twelve-year-old PHP runs on more than 22 million Web sites and is used inside 15,000 companies.

Technical improvements by Zend and Microsoft to make it easier to run PHP on Windows computers will be available to PHP's active base of contributors for further enhancement, starting in the first quarter of 2007.

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 is mostly about Microsoft being competitive," said Stephen O'Grady, an analyst with software analyst firm Redmonk in Denver

Source

[Jordan]

I wouldn't think that Microsoft would even endorse this over ASP. I have to agree though, the reason it doesn't work would be because of Windows.