[development] What's a critical issue

[Bryan Ruby]

Khalid Baheyeldin wrote:
> I just can't keep myself from responding to this.
>
> First, Microsoft "bought" this statistics, by going to large domain name
> registrars and offering them incentives to park their domains on IIS to
> pump up the traffic. One of those is GoDaddy, and with the number of
> domains they park, you see the spike in there.
I agree that GoDaddy and other big players is part of the reason for the 
spike in IIS use (even Netcraft reported that as one of the potential 
reasons for IIS gains against Apache).  However, it's also important to 
realize that it's a lot easier to run PHP these days on IIS.  Zend 
Technologies over the past year has made significant inroads to pushing 
PHP onto other platforms beyond LAMP.  See: 
http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,1895,2193783,00.asp

    Zend and Microsoft built on a partnership the companies fostered
    over the last year, beginning with last year's ZendCon PHP
    conference. This year, Microsoft announced the release of the GoLive
    beta of an Internet Information Services add-on component, FastCGI.
    FastCGI serves as an interface between PHP and an IIS Web server
    delivering substantial reliability and performance benefits for PHP
    applications running on Windows. It is now available for free from
    Microsoft at http://www.iis.net/php.

These days, there really are not many differences to how a PHP 
application runs on either Apache or IIS.  I think the use of running 
PHP on IIS will only continue to increase and not decrease.  I spent the 
last five years running an in-house PHP CMS on IIS/Windows for an office 
Intranet server.  Recently we switched the Intranet over to Apache/Linux 
and except for a few minor changes in the scripts, the migration was 
easy.  The organization I work for has a pretty healthy mix of Windows, 
Linux, and Unix clients/servers and it's been my experience that all 
platforms have merit.  Drupal should be Drupal, no matter what platform 
or server it runs on.  JMHO.

-Bryan