As Windows Vista RC2 hit last week I've come across several mildly disturbing articles regarding the integrity of Vista as a development platform. First off was the announcement of SP1 Beta for Visual Studio 2005 on Somasegar's blog. Sounds like good news, right? Well, further down he also reveals that Vista will not support Visual Studio 2002 or Visual Studio 2003. In addition, he admits that Visual Studio 2005 will most likely suffer from compatibility issues beyond those addressed in SP1. In my mind this doesn't communicate strong support for what is supposed to be Microsoft's flagship development platform. I imagine this issue could easily stop most developers from trying Vista anytime soon due to the fact that they still need to continue supporting older applications via older versions of Visual Studio.There have also been rumors going back and forth debating Java's ability to keep up with the new "Aero" look and feel in Vista. Thankfully, it appears as if this will only be an issue for older versions of Java.
On a positive note, IIS 7 in Vista will finally elevate PHP to a first class citizen. The newest version of Microsoft's webserver is on target to introduce a FastCGI host. Such a change will honor the single-process-per-request execution model of PHP, but do so much more efficiently than traditional CGI. For more information check out this blog entry by Mike Volodarsky (member of the IIS team).
2 comments:
It's strange that you talk about FastCGI as a "PHP thing". Actually, FastCGI is gaining popularity right now primarily because of the popularity of Ruby on Rails and its competitors (e.g. Django and Turbogears). The story might be different for Windows but on commodity Unix hosting, FastCGI is primarily associated with the heavyweight frameworks. Google "FastCGI" and scan the first page of hits.
Actually, in my post I don't say anything about FastCGI being PHP specific. I merely say FastCGI will be available in IIS 7 and give PHP as an example of one of the languages that will benefit from it.
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