Don Raman's Blog

My PHP installation is not working? I am not able to run my PHP scripts? A simple PHPINFO page is not loading in my browser? These are typical questions I hear from users in the forum. I would still say the best way to install PHP is to use WPI as described by me here and here. I am telling this because WPI installation involves non-manual steps of installing PHP 5.2.11 or PHP5.3.

Today we did the official release for ARR Version 2 for IIS7.0 on Vista/Windows 2008 and IIS7.5 on Windows7/Windows 2008 R2 and it is now fully supported by Microsoft Support.

With WINCACHE 1.0 RC one can configure parts of WINCACHE solution on a per site basis. As you know WINCACHE has two kinds of cache namely output code cache and file cache. With RC release, you have the ability to turn output code cache on a per site basis. We have got a new WINCACHE directive named WINCACHE.OCENABLEDFILTER which can be used to enable/disable output code cache on a per site basis. This INI directive can take a string which is list of comma separated  numbers. Each number in the string represents a valid site id which is a unique identity IIS gives to each Web Site when the site gets created. All the site id included as part of this string will actually toggle the value of WINCACHE.ocenabled while running WINCACHE functionality. Example, if you have below in your PHP INI file:

At times we get posting on the forum where user complain that when they are running a PHP file, the output is the file itself. This means that the script was not recognized as a PHP script and rather it was treated as plain text by the browser. There are two reasons why you can run into this situation to my knowledge.

As you know we released WINCACHE 1.0 RC early last week. We have got some good response for all the new features and bug fixes the RC release contains. If you haven't tried the RC version you should definitely try it out. We also included a brand new WINCACHE statistics page which displays lot of useful statistics about the cache. However there were people in the forum who complained about getting the login dialog again and again no matter what they pass as login/password.

This breaking change has got an interesting story. While we were developing this WINCACHE module and I got the initial build to test I realized that the only way to test it using CGI version of PHP. Well I being a developer myself checked out the sources and commented out the code to make it run for CLI version of PHP too. Life was good for me and I found some bugs. Eventually I did move to CGI but I wanted the support for CLI too. I asked my developer to enable it for CLI too. The developer obliged to this and I was so happy getting this on regular builds.

I will be talking about some new features we have coded in WINCACHE RC release. We have introduced new API and changes/additions to the WINCACHE INI directives. I am going to explain two new improvements we have done over Beta release which will dictate how WINCACHE is going to cache the file.

We did the Release Candidate (RC) release of WINCACHE today. For details look here. It is exciting to see this out as this gives more flexibility in running the software in production environment. One of the enhancement we have done in this release is to provide a brand new statistics page on popular demand. Lot of people asked about statistics page in the forum. We worked on a new statistics page which is really full of lot of information and will be very useful. It has got: