In case Microsoft's commitment to provide a valid equivalent to LAMP with WISP was ever doubted, PHP 5.3 Release Candidate 2 should put worries to rest. PHP 5.3 RC2 is now available for download, with the Redmond company emphasizing that the release is highly optimized for the Windows operating system. The software giant has in fact been working closely with the people in the PHP developing community in an effort to make PHP play increasingly nice with Windows.

“I’ve been working for many months with Pierre Joye – well really, many people in the PHP community – on getting PHP to run faster on Windows,” revealed Garrett Serack, Microsoft program manager. “Pierre has been working rapidly on upgrading libraries (Pierre pioneered the work to get PHP and its hoard of dependent libraries updated and properly compiling on Windows), replacing old POSIX-emulation code with native calls, patching bugs, and about a million other things, all of which had a huge impact on performance and stability of PHP on Windows.”

PHP is an essential component shared by both LAMP and WISP. LAMP is an acronym that stands for Linux, Apache MySQL and PHP. In contrast, WISP is Windows, Internet Information Services, SQL Server and PHP, of course. The largest problem standing in the way of WISP's adoption was inferior performance of PHP on Windows over Linux. This is why Microsoft has poured consistent resources into fixing the PHP performance handicap. PHP 5.3 RC2 is just one more step in the right direction for the software giant.

“Only the non-thread-safe version is available, so you need to use FastCGI with IIS in order to use it,” Serack added. “Since this is a radically different build than the ones that had been traditionally used to create the Windows PHP binaries, you should download the binaries and test with them, but you probably should avoid using them in production just yet.”