MSDN Magazine - January 2008 - (Page 53)

oped with ASP.NET in mind. I’ll show you how it’s possible to both augment an application with existing ASP.NET features and add to the app by developing new features that take advantage of IISlevel ASP.NET extensibility. The application in question is a popular PHP image gallery application called Qdig (qdig.sourceforge.net). Without so much as touching a single line of PHP code, I’ll show you how to add some handy new features to the image gallery. First, I will password-protect the gallery using the ASP.NET membership and forms authentication features. I will also upgrade it to use search-engine-friendly URLs instead of unsightly, parameterized query-string URLs. Finally, I will use the ASP.NET output cache to dramatically improve the performance of the application. But first, let’s look at some history behind the new PHP support in IIS, which is at the core of allowing application frameworks like PHP to enjoy the full set of IIS 7.0 features. IIS and PHP IIS had always supported PHP, but in a way that precluded many real-life PHP applications from being hosted in production environments. This was due to limitations in the two ways IIS offered for running PHP applications: using the Common Gateway Interface (CGI) protocol or using the PHP ISAPI extension. Because CGI requires a separate process for each request, apps hosted using CGI would perform poorly on Windows. Conversely, PHP apps using the IIS high-performance multithreaded ISAPI interface would often suffer from instability due to the lack of thread safety in some popular PHP extensions. In an attempt to solve these problems, the IIS team developed the FastCGI component. The open FastCGI protocol allows PHP and many other application frameworks that require a single-threaded environment (including Ruby on Rails, Perl, and Python) to run more reliably on IIS. Unlike the standard CGI implementation, FastCGI enables process reuse by maintaining a pool of worker processes, each processing no more than one request at a time, thus resulting in much-improved performance. FastCGI also benefitted from a community-centric development and testing model. At the same time, Zend Technologies worked to improve the general performance and stability of the PHP scripting engine and core extensions on Windows, making numerous performance improvements and fixing dozens of Windows-specific bugs. As I am writing this, php.net/downloads offers PHP 5.2.3, the third release of PHP optimized for Windows hosting, with fast nonthread-safe builds optimized for the IIS FastCGI platform. The IIS FastCGI support is built into Windows Server 2008 starting with the Beta 3 release, and is available as a separate Tech Preview download for Windows Vista, Windows XP, and a Go-Live release for Windows Server 2003 (iis.net/fastcgi). When Windows Vista SP1 ships, this component will also be available as part of the installation package. In the near future, final versions for Windows XP and Windows Server 2003 will be released as well. You can read more about the options you have for running IIS FastCGI today at mvolo.com/blogs/serverside/archive/2007/10/09/IIS-FastCGI-and-PHP_3A00_-Whatyou-absolutely-need-to-know-to-host-PHP-applications-on-IIS-6-and-IIS-7.aspx. Figure 1 The Qdig Gallery IIS 7.0 with FastCGI makes setting up a PHP application pretty simple. To get started, I created a Web site and added a myphpgallery host header binding so it could be accessed as http://myphpgallery from my local machine. (I also added the myphpgallery hostname to %windir%\system32\drivers\etc\hosts so my machine knew where to find it.) Next, I downloaded the latest version of Qdig from qdig.sourceforge.net and unzipped it into the Web site root. To prepare for testing the gallery, I dropped a bunch of images into the IIS had always root of the Web site (you supported PHP, but in a can also create subdirecway that precluded many tories and drop images in there as well). In this case, real-life PHP applications I used some of the samfrom being hosted in ple images included with production environments. Windows Vista. I downloaded the latest non-thread-safe PHP build for Windows (PHP 5.2.3 as we go to press), from php.net/downloads and unzipped it to C:\php. I was pretty much good to go at this point, although I needed to make a few tweaks to php.ini that are required for Qdig: 1. Rename php-recommended.ini to php.ini 2. Set “register_long_arrays=On” 3. Enable the GD extension with “extension=php_gd2.dll” 4. Set the correct extension path with “extension_dir=./ext” From the IIS perspective, allowing the PHP app to run requires only a couple of steps. First, add the PHP/FastCGI handler mapping to the PHP-CGI.EXE, as described in the following articles: for Windows Vista: go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=104195 and for Windows Server 2008 and Windows Vista SP1: go.microsoft.com/fwlink/ ?LinkId=104196. Then add index.php as the default document. january2008 53 Setting Up the App http://qdig.sourceforge.net http://qdig.sourceforge.net http://qdig.sourceforge.net http://php.net/downloads http://php.net/downloads http://iis.net/fastcgi http://microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=104195 http://mvolo.com/blogs/serverside/archive/2007/10/09/IIS-FastCGI-and-PHP_3A00_-Whatyou-absolutely-need-to-know-to-host-PHP-applications-on-IIS-6-and-IIS-7.aspx http://mvolo.com/blogs/serverside/archive/2007/10/09/IIS-FastCGI-and-PHP_3A00_-Whatyou-absolutely-need-to-know-to-host-PHP-applications-on-IIS-6-and-IIS-7.aspx http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=104196 http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=104196 http://mvolo.com/blogs/serverside/archive/2007/10/09/IIS-FastCGI-and-PHP_3A00_-Whatyou-absolutely-need-to-know-to-host-PHP-applications-on-IIS-6-and-IIS-7.aspx

Table of Contents Feed for the Digital Edition of MSDN Magazine - January 2008

MSDN Magazine - January 2008 Contents Toolbox CLR Inside Out Data Points Advanced Basics Cutting Edge IIS 7.0 - Enhance Your Apps with the Integrated ASP.NET Pipeline World Ready - Around the World with ASP.NET AJAX Applications WCF Syndication - HTTP Programming with WCF and the .NET Framework 3.5 Wicked Code Foundations Extreme ASP.NET {End Bracket}

MSDN Magazine - January 2008

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