Microsoft and Zend Collaboration

PHP: Hypertext Processor is the most popular scripting language for web development according to TIOBE and coming from a .NET background I was thrilled to hear that Microsoft Corp. has been in collaboration with PHP vendor, Zend Technologies Ltd. John K. Waters’ article What’s Next for Microsoft and PHP? briefs Microsoft Silverlight in adopting PHP for RIA (Rich Internet Application), following Adobe Flex. More interestingly is the support of PHP in the Dynamic Language Runtime announcement to add services to the .NET CLR. If now IronPython and Ruby are supported in .NET, why not PHP?

This article surely got me excited to google for more and found that this collaboration between Microsoft and Zend is back dated since 2006 in “Microsoft Opens PHP Door” and in “Microsoft Hosts Project to Run PHP on .NET” not for the support of PHP under IIS (wich seems to be a terrible combination due to performance and reliability issues), but for the initial partnership in supporting PHP on .NET. The effort project called Phalanger to bringing PHP onto a .NET environment can be followed at http://www.codeplex.com/Phalanger