Enhance your apps with the Integrated ASP.Net Pipleline
The January publication of MSDN Magazine carried an article titled "Enhance your apps with Integrated ASP.Net Pipleline". While the subject of the article is not something that I would normally be super excited about, I decidede to spend at least 10 minutes perusing the article while commuting to work this morning (Been riding the train past couple of weeks). I recently installed Vista on my Notebook, and was keen to start looking into the features of IIS 7.0, which ships with microsoft's latest desktop operating system. As it turned out, the article touched on a subject that might be useful down the road as we take a leap into the world of PHP programming at work.
Its long been common knowledge that PHP could run under IIS, but not in a way that would make it feasible to run production apps...in other words, if you configure your PHP apps in IIS 6.0/5.0, the result would be a web site that runs very slow, if nothing else, due mainly to the lack of thread safety in PHP apps. Alternately, the app could be configured to run under IIS using CGI, but CGI is a resource hog (one process per request) and results in an app that scale poorly in IIS.
For example, IIS 7 allows PHP, Ruby, Perl etc to utilize the ASP.Net Integrated mode engine to take advantage of features like ASP.Net membership and forms authentication, login controls etc. The new ASP.Net Integrated Pipeline feature of IIS 7.0 also allows us the ability to leverage our .net skills in applying cool features such as URL-rewriting, Output caching to these none asp.net apps by writing modules that can be plugged directly into the request processing pipeline via IIS. If you are unfortunate enough to be still running a couple of classic ASP pages within your .net Framework application, you will be releieved to know that IIS7.0 now makes it possible for these classic ASP pages to utilize functionality that per previously unavailable under IIS 5.x/ 6.
If you are developing under Windows Vista, you already have acccess to IIS 7.0. On the Server end, IIS 7.0 will be realeased with windows Server 2008 in Late February. The FastCGI component will be avaialable with this release of windows Server 2008, under Vista, its available via Service pack 1.