Windows Cache Extension 1.0 for PHP Now Available

Adding extra horsepower to PHP applications running on top of the Windows operating system is now a simple task. On November 19th, Microsoft made available for download version 1.0 of the Windows Cache Extension for PHP, or WinCache. The extension was put together by the Microsoft Internet Information Services (IIS) team and is essentially designed to provide a PHP accelerator for customers choosing Windows and Windows Server rather than Linux and Apache to run their PHP apps.

Peter Galli, the Open Source Community manager for Microsoft's Platform Strategy Group, has revealed that with the GA of version 1.0, Windows Cache Extension is ready for deployment into production environments. WinCache is an open source project offered under the BSD license, with Microsoft providing full access to the source code.

WinCache extension is a significant open source contribution from Microsoft to the PHP on Windows community. The extension code is hosted and maintained on PHP Extensions Community Library (PECL) and is available for everyone to view, branch, compile, and contribute to,” Galli noted.

As a Windows PHP caching extension, WinCache was made a part of the PECL extension library, offered for free and requiring little additional efforts from developers beyond implementation. The promise from Microsoft is that the extension is capable of delivering a boost to the performance of all PHP applications on Windows, without developers having to modify the code of their apps.

“WinCache is our first big open source contribution to the PHP on Windows community. The IIS team has made several code contributions (big fixes) to the PHP 5.3 release, as well as provided support for the Windows Installer for PHP community (John Mertic rocks) and the Windows documentation on the PHP website. This WinCache release is a substantial amount of code that we are open sourcing on the PECL extension library. We hope others join this new community to help accelerate PHP performance on Windows,” stated IIS team Product Unit manager Mai-lan Tomsen Bukovec.

Windows Cache Extension 1.0 for PHP is available for download here.