BANGALORE, INDIA:Last month we looked at the new architecture of IIS7 over its predecessor IIS6. We saw that thanks to its new 'Integrated Pipeline' mode, features of ASP.NET are now available as modules in IIS7 and therefore are available to any other programming platform running on this server. This article takes a look at actually using these features in a PHP application.

The Integrated Pipeline in IIS7 allows the ASP.NET features such as Forms Authentication, Caching, URL Filtering and URL Rewriting to work as modules within the context of IIS7. Because of this, we can now start using many of the features of this pipeline in other programming platforms as well.

During the development phase of IIS7, Microsoft partnered closely with Zend, the makers of PHP, to create an optimized version of PHP that works with this new Integrated Pipeline. It gives PHP features that are not available in either the LAMP or the XAMP stack. In addition, they have also come up with a generic IIS7 module, called FastCGI that allows other platforms (say Perl, ColdFusion, etc) to also take advantage of this pipeline in the future.

Next, we need to have a PHP Web application that we can use as a sample. For this example, we will use a simple PHP application called QDig. Unzip the archive into say c:\inetpub\wwwroot\ Qdig. Put some sample photos in the gallery folder to use as a sample. Now open up IIS Manager. This is where we will be doing a number of different configuration level changes that enable PHP to work with the Integrated Pipeline. First of all, open up the server treeview for the current machine and right click on Default Web Site and add a new Web Application.

Give the application a unique name, such as QDIG and point the physical path to the folder you extracted the program to. But make sure that the Application Pool is set to 'DefaultAppPool' if not already. This application pool uses the Integrated Mode for IIS7 and therefore provides its features to sites and applications using it.