One of my favorite sessions at the MIX Conference was “Partying with PHP” by Joe Stagner whose official title is Senior Program Manager, but would rather go by the title of “Microsoft’s Opinionated Misfit Geek”. Joe is one guys responsible for the large number of ASP.NET AJAX Videos that are are on the ASP.NET AJAX site. If you have not checked them out, I would recommend them. They are “bite sized” (some as short as 2 minutes) and a great way to learn the ins and outs of ASP.NET AJAX and the Control Toolkit. But enough about ASP.NET AJAX, let’s talk about PHP.

Humorous Moment

Part of Joe’s presentation was on running PHP on IIS on Windows Servers (as opposed to the more typical scenario of PHP on Apache on Linux). Joe wanted to address some of the typical concerns about IIS, so he asked the open ended question “What are the worst things about IIS?” I think that Joe was looking for the typical responses of “Security” or “Hard to configure in a Web Farm”. Somebody shouted from the back of the room:

“It only runs on Windows” Joe took the comment in stride. 🙂

What is interesting about PHP?

I have been interested in PHP for a while. I don’t profess to be an expert on PHP in any way, shape or form (I can fumble around with the language itself and get the basics to work). Most of my direct working experience has been working with PHP developers in interoperability situations (long story short I built an application for a customer that PHP sites could interact with - It was a REST based application before we were calling it REST).

Some of the best sites on the Internet are written in PHP

One of my favorite sites in Flickr and while it uses a number of technologies, but much of the site is written in PHP. Read the book Building Scalable Websites by Cal Henderson if you want to get an insight into how PHP is used on Flickr.

PHP Shows the power of community 

PHP has a very rich community environment. If I want to add a forum to my PHP site, I have several good options to choose from. ASP.NET has a couple good community projects, but nothing on the scale of what PHP has to offer. 

PHP | Tek Next Week

Joe Stagner will be in Chicago next week speaking at the PHPTek conference. I was lucky enough to get into the conference, because it is now sold out. I will try and post a blog entry or two from the conference and let you know how it goes (and of course report on any other humorous moments).