To start with, all work took about 1:30, including Skype distractions, reading how-to’s, etc. Only one problem I had is that I was given remote desktop connection access to Windows Server 2008 machine, but I’m working with Linux. How to connect to remote desktop from Linux?
Luckily, I had Windows XP in VirtualBox so I tried it. And it worked really well. I’m using university internet network so connections speeds are very fast and Ubuntu -> Windows Xp -> Windows Server 2008 worked just fine. Later I will probably use real Windows system, but for first steps virtual machine worked much more faster than I expected.
Almost 4 years ago I had experience installing IIS server, but I haven’t done much since then. Nevertheless, installing IIS+PHP was really easy – I followed this tutorial, which shows you how to install Microsoft Web Platform, and IIS was ready. Platform installer allows you to install not only SQL, PHP, ASP.NET, etc. but also various web applications – Wordpress, Drupal and many more. Experience with IIS was very similar to Zend Server, but IIS control panel is way better.
I chose to install Wordpress, just to test if IIS is working properly, but Platform installer doesn’t install MySQL. PHP is installed with MySQL extension, but no server is being installed – quite illogical. However, installing MySQL server is as easy as installing any other windows application (subjective) – download installer, Next, Next, Next and server is running. Also, mysql tool works the same in Windows cmd and Linux console.
Tutorials and other information:
- Creating your PHP dev environment for the WinPHP Challenge
- Microsoft Web Platform
- Setting up MySQL for PHP applications
- PHP on IIS7
What I liked very much is GUI for web server control. Currently I have 13 web apps running in my laptop and every app has different port (localhost:80, localhost:81, localhost:82, etc.), but I haven’t found any good tool for adding more sites. I would like to have simple tool, which would accept port number and directory, and create virtual host. IIS control application allows it very easily.
In conclusion, working with PHP in Windows server seems to be pretty acceptable. I haven’t tested setting up anything except Wordpress, but Wordpress seems to work just fine. Especially I liked using GUI, because most of tasks for development machine can be done much more easier and faster, still I’m not going to switch from Linux yet.
Advantages:
- GUI
- Easy to setup
- PHP works
Disadvantages:
- Some functionality is hard to find
- Differences from Apache (mod_rewrite, etc.)
Laurynas
