Windows Web Hosting, Web Technologies, etc
Archive for April, 2007
Applied Innovations Mentioned in eWeek
Apr 27th
eWeek has an article talking about Beta 3 of Longhorn and it mentions the current IIS7 Beta hosts:
- MaximumASP
- DiscountASP
- Applied Innovations
- Hostmysite
- Web Fusion
and mentions the following hosts are due to release their offering soon:
- CrystalTech
- Mosso
- Affinity
You can read the article here:
PHP on Windows and what’s happening
Apr 26th
I blogged earlier about the great work the Microsoft Team was doing with the Zend team to get PHP running better on Windows. I can definitely say it’s made a difference. Some of our clients run really large PHP sites or bulletin boards (in fact this blog is running on PHP 5.2.1 on Windows). In today’s Zend newsletter they mentioned an article in Redmond Developer News: Zend Boosts PHP on Windows.
My favorite quote from the article is:
“[A] lot of PHP development happens on Windows,” says Mark de Visser, Zend’s chief marketing officer. “However, most deployment happens on Linux. Why? Because PHP just doesn’t run very well on Windows. That was something that Microsoft didn’t like and that we saw as a problem. So, we got together with the aim of making sure that PHP had equal performance on Windows as it has on Linux and Unix.”
Followed by:
Zend is claiming improved Windows performance of between 200 percent and 300 percent overall with Zend Core 2.0.
These improvements were ofcourse returned to community in the release of PHP 5.2.1 which is running on all of our php ready windows shared hosting servers.
Just when you thought FrontPage Server Extensions were no more..
Apr 26th
With the release of Expression Web and announcement that FrontPage was no longer being developed alot of FrontPage developers.. well were up in arms. Many have already adopted Expression Web, others moved to other tools (Dreamweaver) and then the die hards simply decided they would use FrontPage until FrontPage no longer worked.
Enterprising Expression Web adopters have learned how to enable all the FrontPage web bots in Expression Web so they can continue to use them but with the looming release of IIS7 the question has been “are FrontPage Server Extensions going to be supported?”. Well Robert McMurray has answered the looming question on his blog. It looks like they are looking into an updated version of FPSE that could be supported on IIS7.
Personally, FPSE has been both a blessing and a curse for webhosts. Many clients tend to go in and just annihilate all of the security settings in FrontPage and then wonder why their site gets defaced. Or they post default guestbooks and comment forms and wonder why they’re getting spammed so heavily from them. I think for backwards compatibility this is a good idea and it’s certainly welcomed. However, I would really love to see an FPSE adapter created instead of just reviving FPSE from the dead. Perhaps a new IIS component that could make FPSE webbots work but at the same time provide an alternative (and more secure) functionality without having to re-enable FPSE. Like an adapter, connector, etc.. So former FrontPage users could still have the same webbot functionality but it would use updated technology (ASP.NET forms, master pages and CSS, etc).
Great News for those looking to run their own IIS7 / Longhorn Server
Apr 26th
We’ve had the pleasure of really digging in Longhorn and IIS7 for a few months now but yesterday Microsoft made the first public beta release of Longhorn available. This new beta also includes the latest builds of IIS7 and a plethora of new information was released along with this.
You can learn more about what’s new in this release of IIS7 on www.iis.net. Bill Staples blog has a great write-up on just what all has changed with IIS7 in this release.
The IIS team has the golive program and details available at: http://www.iis.net/default.aspx?tabid=7&subtabid=79
In addition, if you just want to see what your application will look like in a beta shared IIS7 hosting environment then head over to our IIS7 beta page and check it out. We’ve been deploying ruby-on-rails on IIS7, FastCGI and PHP on IIS7 and really trying to see just what she can do. Yes, we’re committed to providing the tools developers demand and PHP (and soon FastCGI) on the Windows platform are two tools they’ll be demanding more and more. We’re already seeing a strong adoption of PHP/MySQL applications on shared hosting be is CMS applications, E-Commerce applications, Forums and Bulletin Boards or custom applications, PHP on Windows is going to become a very common shared hosting environment and we’re offering it, TODAY!
IIS7 is without question going to revolutionize not only Windows Hosting and shared hosting as a whole but is going to bring a new level of control and configurability to developers. To get developers up to speed immediately the IIS team has made available an IIS7 developers resource center off of the IIS.net website. In the past few weeks there’s been a large number of new articles and webcasts posted as well. IIS.NET is definitely a site worth bookmarking.
