Open source PHP software and IIS

April 19, 2008 10:04 AM

Disadvantages working with Open Source PHP Software in a WIMP environment?

I may be looking a bunch a of work in a WIMP (Windows, IIS, MySQL, PHP). I typically utilize a lot of open source PHP open source software in a LAMP enivronment. I'm wondering how much of a disadvantage working in the WIMP environment this will be.

posted by fx3000 to computers & internet (8 comments total)

There isn't much of a disadvantage -- only thing you need to pay attention to is your directory separators ( / vs \ ) and drive roots... just make sure you make those things configurable and you'll be fine. PHP is pretty darned portable. And IIS makes some things, like accessing MS-SQL databases, a lot easier.

Only disadvantage will be with MySQL -- MySQL doesn't perform too well on windows because of file handle limitations. You can quickly get into a lot of file-access binding because of the hard set number of files the MySQL server can keep open in RAM and on disk in Windows. I'd put your MySQL server on a linux box or use MS-SQL if at all possible.

Only other thing is that IIS doesn't handle load as well as Apache does in some cases.
posted by SpecialK at 10:16 AM on April 19, 2008

You may have to spend some time rewriting parts of your open source software. There are quite a few php functions that don't work/work differently on windows/iis but for the most part there will be very little difference.
posted by missmagenta at 10:37 AM on April 19, 2008

There are *lots* of PHP developers who develop on Windows and deploy to Linux. So I can't see there being much of a problem.
posted by meta_eli at 10:42 AM on April 19, 2008

There are *lots* of PHP developers who develop on Windows and deploy to Linux. So I can't see there being much of a problem.
Most aren't using IIS though. I too use windows to develop php applications but WAMP is very different to WIMP.
posted by missmagenta at 11:26 AM on April 19, 2008

Does IIS do mod_rewrite type stuff without third party commercial addons yet? That'd be a pretty serious disadvantage to me.
posted by Freaky at 12:05 PM on April 19, 2008

Yeah, it's more the fact that you're not using Apache that's going to cause problems than being on Windows. Some apps will work without things like mod_rewrite and with different server variables etc., but others will never have been intended to work with IIS and may require a lot of tweaking.
I'd recommend moving to WAMP if you can.
posted by malevolent at 12:10 PM on April 19, 2008

One solution I was thinking of is to run IIS and Apache simultaneously on the same Windows machine. Has anyone ever done this with much success?
posted by fx3000 at 1:24 PM on April 19, 2008

Careful, you're Overloading your acronyms.

Anyway, why uses IIS at all? I've always used Apache on Windows. In general a LAMP app will work perfectly with in WAMP, unless they're trying to use Unix shell escapes (which is always a possibility)
posted by delmoi at 10:48 PM on April 20, 2008