Re: PHP Vs ASP - OT reply?

I was the person (or at least one) on this list who advised Owen re: NT/PHP. Our own internal experiences (and those of someone else on the PHP-windows list) were that ISAPI definitely wasn't there, and that even CGI isn't there, at least for what we were trying to do. I may come across rude here - I don't mean to be. I understand there is a resource shortage of Windows people on the PHP team right off the bat, which can't help matters at all. Couple that with what is undoubtedly a difficult environment to program in (MS programs written by MS themselves crash regularly!) and it's easy to see why the NT version isn't as stable. Our main issues of stability under NT/PHP are probably to do with DB drivers. We've only tried using the ODBC and MSSQL drivers, but the system either crashes *or* runs OK in CGI mode, but that is incredibly slow for our needs. Even in CGI, the stability depends on the machine. It was fine under NT in the office - remote deployment crash in 10 minutes. (perhaps Oracle drivers are fine?) Running *STRAIGHT* PHP scripts in CGI did work pretty well, but we need to connect to files and databases, and it just wasn't proving ready yet. Whether it's entirely PHP or NT is definitely up for debate, but the fact that something like cold fusion DOES run under NT (however slow or bloated) means that other scripting language environments can run. Allaire also has far more resources to throw at it, so I don't mean this to be disparaging to the PHP team. As much as we can say 'don't run mission critical sites on NT', we in fact have, and it's been, by and large, not *too* bad. We've got one site that's doing >30,000 orders in a day, running on a farm of NT servers (6 normally) and one SQL server. The ASP has held up OK. The SQL7 has held up OK. Main issues are expandability and development. Remote NT development is a huge headache and cost compared to Linux/Telnet/SSH. All in all there's not much in the way of real support for NT/PHP like there is for Unix/PHP. Chicken and egg - people aren't deploying it, so there aren't people who can answer questions for others. Also, *many* on the Windows list aren't even using NT anyway - 98/PWS/Apache/PHP combinations aren't normally helpful to me trying to deploy on NT4/IIS5 or W2K. Again, I don't want to come across rude at all - I greatly appreciate all that PHP affords us, and in the Unix world it kicks some major butt. But it's not just there yet on Windows. Rasmus Lerdorf wrote: > > I'd agree with you if that was the case, but I have been advised that PHP > > shouldn't be relied upon 100% on NT yet (by people on this list). > > Unfortunately I don't currently have the facts or figures to back this up > > but it has left a nagging doubt at the back of my mind. All the pointers I > > get tend to say that PHP on UNIX is great but it isn't _quite_there on NT > > yet, is that fair? > > Sure, but whether it is the PHP part or the NT part that makes this > combination be "not quite there" is open for debate. I certainly wouldn't > run an NT-based web server for anything critical. > > -Rasmus -- ========================== Michael Kimsal http://www.tapinternet.com 734-480-9961