IIS 7 Aims at Apache

A new version of Internet Information Services (IIS) aims to make Windows a more attractive platform for Web hosters and developers using Apache by providing a more modular architecture, improving the performance of PHP applications, and offering better management tools, particularly for servers that host large numbers of Web applications. IIS 7 is in beta now and will ship with Windows Server 2008, which is expected to be available in early 2008. A special license is also available that allows customers to use the beta in a production environment, albeit with no formal product support.

Development Platform

For developers, IIS 7 contains two particular features that could help build higher-performance Web applications—improved performance for PHP (a server-side scripting language for building Web applications that is particularly widely used with Apache) and a caching system to allow previously processed pages to be reused.

Making PHP Faster

Although IIS has always supported PHP, because of the way PHP communicated with it, IIS did not perform as fast as Apache running on Linux.