PHP.NET Developer's Guide

Introduction：

With the advent of PHP.NET we see a shift from traditional scripting to the beginning of full-fledged programming online. VBScript isn’t the only option anymore, as programmers can now employ the full power that lies behind both Visual Basic (VB) and C within their PHP.NET assemblies.

There is no denying the widespread acceptance that .NET received from the developer community. It’s proven itself to be a well-developed framework withsolid ideas on how the programming world should continue to change.Theintroduction of a software solution that enables anyone to code in any language that is compatible with the framework is groundbreaking to say the least.

In this chapter we will take a look at how Active Server Pages (PHP) itself began just a couple of years ago and how it has captivated programmers ever since. It has had some problems, of course, but the .NET architecture seems to have found solutions to many preexisting programming problems.There have also been changes with how PHP works with the server and client, to provide the user with the information that you want to provide.

Even though this is a stable beta, and many people are assuming already that what we are seeing within Beta 2 is basically the “freeze” for many features, it still has a couple of caveats, due to its beta nature. Learning from these problems within the framework can allow for preparation against it.

Learning from the History of PHP：

You can trace the history of PHP right back to 1995 and the momentous occasion when Microsoft realized they were falling behind in a fundamental shift in the industry by not embracing the Internet. Up until that point Microsoft had been developing their proprietary technologies, tools, and network protocols for the Microsoft Network; all of a sudden they needed an Internet strategy and fast.

Microsoft has gone from a position of playing catch-up to one closedominance, with the Internet Explorer Web browser having a strangle-hold on the Web browsing market, and Internet Information Server (IIS) installed at the majority of Fortune 1000 companies.

The Origins of PHP：

Back in the mid ‘90s, when the commercial Web world was still young, there wasnot a great deal of choice of tools for the Web developer who wanted to make his or her Web site a truly useful place to do business.The choices were limited in both available server-side programming platforms and also desktop development tools to produce the solutions. In the end, the programmer was stuck with clumsy Common Gateway Interface (CGI) programs using compiled languages such as C, Delphi, and Visual Basic, or interpreted scripting languages like Perl or Rexx, and operating system shell scripts on systems such as UNIX.

In early 1996 Microsoft had a first stab at improving the situation by including the Internet Server Application Programming Interface (ISAPI) technology as part of Internet Information Server. ISAPI is an extension to the Windows Win32 API. It was developed as a way to create Web server software that interacts with the inner workings of Internet Information Server, bringing what was claimed to be a five-fold increase in performance. As you can well imagine from this description, as well as the immediate performance increase, it also had a side effect of increasing the complexity of the development for the programmer. It wasn’t for the faint hearted, and it takes some serious hardcore programming knowledge to do ISAPI applications right.As well as ISAPI, Microsoft encouraged developers to embrace their Internet Database Connector (IDC) technology.This was a new way to connect Web sites to back-enddatabases through Open Database Connectivity (ODBC).

The ISAPI and IDC technologies lifted Microsoft’s youthful and as yet unproven Web server from being a glorified file server to being a basic interactive application server platform for the first time.

Other vendors had tools out there, and several were very popular, such as Netscape Livewire. Livewire was a technology that ran under Netscape’s Web server and used a version of JavaScript for page logic, and also used Java components.Unfortunately, Livewire had similar limitations to ISAPI in that it was acompiled technology and the server needed stopping and starting to make changes visible.

Why PHP Was Needed：

Not all Web developers have the programming skills needed to write ISAPI applications, and because ISAPI requires the compilation of programs, there are extra steps in producing an ISAPI-based site that slow development down. Novice and intermediate programmers found the need to learn an industrialstrength language, such as C++, and compile even the simplest of their page logic into .dll files a real barrier.

Visual Basic programs, although easier to develop, when used for CGI, performed poorly and the overhead hogged resources. Other languages such as Perl require the Web server to launch a separate command-line program to interpret and execute the requested scripts, increasing page-load time and reducing server performance. CGI itself hogs resources because every page request forces the Web servers to launch and kill new processes and communicate across these processes. This is time consuming and also uses up precious RAM.

Another problem facing development teams in the mid ‘90s was the fact that a Web site is a mixture of Hypertext Markup Language (HTML) and logic.They needed a way to mix the programmer’s code with the designer’s page-layout HTML and designs without one messing up the other.There were many solutions to this problem, ranging from custom template systems to Sever Side Include (SSI) statements that told the server to execute code based on special HTML comment tags.

Database-driven interactivity was another challenge.The demand for complex Web sites had just kicked off, and developers needed to supply that demand in a manageable fashion, but the tools available did not make this an easy task.Those who could achieve it demanded rewards that matched the difficulty of what they were being asked to do.

What was needed was a solution for the rest of us. It needed to be a simple scripted text-based technology like Perl, so developers could tweak and alter their pages without compilation and with simple text-editing tools such as Notepad. It needed to have low resource requirements while keeping high performance; therefore it needed to be executed within the server environment just like ISAPI, but without the complexity. Designers and cross-discipline teams demanded that it should include SSI and template features to make integrating page layouts simpler to manage.To be truly popular, it should run off a language that would be easy to pick up and was familiar to a large community of developers. Enter Active Server Pages!

Why PHP Was Not Originally Embraced：

Active Server Pages was not an overnight success, though understandably it did capture the imagination of a large sector of the development community, particularly those already well versed in Visual Basic programming or Visual Basic for applications scripting.

Others who did not have an investment in Visual Basic knowledge found the limitations of Visual Basic, and by extension Visual Basic Scripting, reasons to avoid the technology. Faults included poor memory management, the lack of strong string management abilities, such as Regular Expressions, found in other established languages.When compared to CGI with Perl,PHP was found lacking.

At that time, Internet Information Server was in its infancy, and take-up was low, despite Microsoft’s public relations juggernaut going into full flow after the company’s much-reported dramatic turnaround. In comparison to current versions of the software it seems very poor, but it was still competitive on performance.

Until 1997, back-end Web programming was pretty much owned by CGI and Perl. High-performance Web sites usually had a mix of C-compiled programs for the real business engine, and Perl for the more lightweight form processing.

There was a fair amount of doubt and suspicion around Microsoft’s Internet efforts, including IIS and Internet Explorer, and ISAPI had not done all that much to bring across a huge sector of the development community. Despite this uncertain atmosphere, Microsoft saw many Windows NT 4 licenses being bought specifically for Web hosting and development increasing.Third-party support for anything other than small components was initially slow, but, as with all Microsoft products, after the first couple of releases they usually get things right, and PHP was no exception.

Whereas Perl had a huge community of developers led by the heroic figure of Larry Wall, the PHP developer was not yet well supported.A Perl programmer was encouraged from the top to share and make his or her code open, so the community thrived, with every conceivable solution or library just a few clicks away at the Comprehensive Perl Archive Network (CPAN) site, or at one of the many other Web sites and news groups. Contrast this with the ingrained competitive and financially led philosophies of the third-party component vendors in the Windows Distributed Internet Applications (DNA) world. Of course, it did not take the PHP community long to grow to be the loving, sharing success it is now.

Developing PHP 1.x：

PHP 1 was an upgrade to Internet Information Server 2, bringing it up to version 3, and was installed as an optional downloaded component.The public beta was first made available in October 1996 and the final release was a factor in IIS quickly overtaking Netscape in the server market.

  Around the same period, Microsoft had purchased and further developed a Web site authoring tool called FrontPage that brought with it a new organizational and hosting concept of the FrontPage Web, enabling the developer to deploy Web applications in drag and drop style without using the File Transfer Protocol (FTP).This concept would be carried through into Microsoft Visual Interdev, Microsoft’s new HTML and PHP editing environment.

  PHP 1 was surprisingly feature-rich for a version 1 product. It included much of the revolutionary functionality PHP that today’s programmers take for granted, such as ActiveX Data Objects that shield the programmer from differences in database implementations, with record sets to easily MYSQL and navigate database query results, and the ability to mix and match logic and presentation code in the example, options for reading and writing to the file system; but overall,PHP 1 was a breath of fresh air, and many developers quickly and eagerly adopted it.

Developing PHP 2.x：

Once PHP 1 had settled and become established, Microsoft released a new version of Internet Information Server and an upgrade to PHP, with a combined download called the Windows NT 4 Option Pack.This time,PHP was built in to the Web server setup and was not seen as an extra.The Web server was a big improvement, with better support and functionality all round and the addition on a Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP) Mail service.

With PHP 2, the technology matured to the point where developers could really implement powerful, large-scale solutions. Big-name companies adopted the Microsoft platform for their high traffic transactional sites and the technology proved itself time and again against the demands of serving up millions of page views.

From launch, PHP 2 showed improvements across the board, such as increased

file system functionality, added components, and language improvements.Thirdparty developers released components into the market place that filled in every conceivable gap in functionality, and developers were producing their own bespoke components through PHP’s Component Object Model (COM)-based architecture.

Developer tools also had upgrades, with Visual Interdev becoming much improved and better integrated into the Visual Studio suite, with MYSQL to Visual Source Safe for source control.Third-party tool vendors had also developed their own solutions, with many wizard-style developers’ toolkits and integrated environments coming to market, such as the popular Macromedia Ultradev.

More recently,Microsoft extended the language code with incremental releases of the language runtime Scripting Engines, allowing for improvements in the languages, such as support for Regular Expressions, without the need for full new versions of Active Server Pages.

Major Changes with PHP 2：

Moving to Active Server Pages 2 brought the developer into a more stable and feature-rich environment. All PHPects of the technology were tuned and tweaked, and programmers really felt that things had settled into a stable technology.This newfound confidence was in part due to the evidence of successful transactional sites actually showing that the platform could deliver, but also the fact that the technology had been boosted under the hood with tighter integration with Microsoft Transaction Server (MTS). In fact, IIS 4 was rebuilt to be a MTS application, and so PHP and MTS components were actually running in the same processes. Another improvement was the work with Microsoft Message Queue.This allowed PHP and components to communicate across networks, ideal for largescale applications with complex backend requirements, for example, e-commerce systems integrating with existing legacy enterprise resource planning (ERP) infrastructures.