Migrating PHP Apps to Windows
by Peter Galli on May 29, 2009 10:32am
Microsoft Malaysia is helping sponsor a competition, known as LAMP2WIN, designed to help ensure that PHP applications run well on both Windows and open source platforms.
The competition, themed ‘World of Interoperability,' is being organized by PHP.net.my and involves migrating PHP applications from the Linux-Apache-MySQL-PHP (LAMP) stack to the Windows platform.
All 20 applications selected were developed for LAMP, with either partial or no support for the Windows platform.
LAMP2WIN contestants will be assigned one of 20 Open Source applications on a round-robin basis across five different categories - blog, forum, eCommerce, wiki and CMS/portal.
Each of the more than 40 contestants will be given a hosted space that supports PHP, IIS and SQL Server, and they will then be able to upload and operationalize their migrated applications to this space at any time during the competition.
These uploaded and operational entries will be viewed and judged by both the public and the official judges. Contestants are also encouraged to blog about their experience while performing the migration, which will help the judges understand the development processes taken.
PHP.net.my founder Ahmad Amran was recently quoted in MIS Asia saying that "as PHP specialists, we realise and utilise the powerful capabilities of PHP, but the shortcomings of some open-source applications available only on certain platforms set off a light bulb in our heads. Why limit ourselves to only one platform when the ecosystem is derived of so many other platforms?"
"This is why we are calling all Malaysian PHP developers to showcase their skills through LAMP2WIN to demonstrate the relevance of interoperability. The underlying idea of the competition is not about selecting the best application, but to contribute back to the Malaysian software ecosystem by providing choice to the people," Amran said.
LAMP2WIN follows a similar competition earlier this year in Japan, designed to get competitive LAMP engineers to increase the volume of technical information around PHP/IIS and application compatibility. The competition was titled "Install Maniax 2008".
A total of 100 engineers were chosen to compete and seeded with Dell server hardware and the Windows Web Server 2008 operating system. They were then required to deploy Windows Server/IIS and make the Web Server accessible from the Internet. They also had to run popular PHP/Perl applications on IIS and publish technical documentation on how to configure those applications to run on IIS.
A total of 71 applications out of the targeted 75 were ported onto IIS, of which 47 were newly ported to IIS, and related new "how to" documents were published to the Internet. Some 24 applications were also ported onto IIS based on existing "how to" documents.