Yahoo! It runs on PHP!

I had a chance to work with PHP years ago. Due to it's similarity with Classic ASP, I could learn & finish a small maintenance task. It wasn't however a cakewalk and I noticed compatibility issues between versions 4 and 5.

I came across some interesting tidbits about PHP in recent weeks & wanted to record them here.

• Rasmus Lerdorf, the creator of PHP is now Infrastructure Architect at Yahoo! and recipient of the 2007 Enterprise Developer of the Year - Oracle Magazine's Editors' Choice Award. Here's an excerpt about him from Oracle Magazine -
  "Back in 1994, Lerdorf developed the PHP dynamic Web page programming language for producing his personal home page. Today Lerdorf uses PHP to manage one of the largest Web sites in the world—Yahoo.com. "Just about everything at Yahoo! is PHP driven," says Lerdorf, who's responsible for Yahoo!'s PHP infrastructure components and common tools.
  The fact that PHP has evolved from managing Lerdorf's home page to massively scalable enterprise Web sites is testimony to not only his original vision but also the support of a wide community of PHP contributors."
• I'm a big fan of the tutorial website W3Schools. It now has a section on PHP. I wish this was there when I was learning PHP.
• IIS7 has a new FastCGI module that lets PHP developers get dramatically better performance, scalability and reliability when running on Windows (sometimes as much as 25x faster than the old PHP CGI module for IIS).

And this reminds me of an anecdote. During his interview with Microsoft, Robert Scoble was asked "how would you get Google to convert from Linux to Windows?". His short answer was - "Acquire them."

Considering the fact that PHP runs on Apache web server on various operating systems as well as IIS on Windows, porting Yahoo! onto Windows wouldn't be a major problem if ever Microsoft were to acquire Yahoo! :-)