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Joomla! 1.6 and IIS WINCACHE

It dropped by a couple of weeks ago in a blog: Developers of the Microsoft IIS team contributed code to the Joomla! project to integrate their WINCACHE product in Joomla! 1.6. But what does it mean?

Joomla! and IIS

Microsoft IIS (Internet Information Server) is a bundled package shipped with Windows Server editions that provides various internet services: FTP server, webserver, mailserver and some extra add-ons. The IIS webserver works a bit different than the most popular webserver of all - Apache - but is still wide-spread.

Officially Joomla! already supports IIS, meaning that you can run Joomla! on IIS as long as you follow the instructions carefully. Even Search Engine Friendly URLs (SEF) are supported, but getting rid of the /index.php/ in the URL is much harder than it is under Apache (check the Joomla! Forum for details).

WINCACHE?

So IIS has already been supported for years. But what's the buzz with Joomla! 1.6 than about? Well, any application always has to deal with performance, and one of the tricks that Joomla! offers to get a higher performance is caching. Caching could be done by writing entire pieces of data to a cache file. But caching could also be done through some kind of PHP caching mechanism.

PHP accelerators

Within Joomla! 1.5, various caching engines are already supported (APC, eAccelerator, memcache, XCache) and - while these engines might gain you performance as soon as you have them installed on the webserver - performance can be even higher if the Joomla! caching classes makes use of these engines as well.

The only thing you have to do is select the proper Cache Handler within the Joomla! Global Configuration. Only engines that are available appear in the drop-down list. But WINCACHE was never available.

Joomla! 1.6 and WINCACHE

WINCACHE is a PHP accelerator written by the IIS team in an effort to run PHP-code faster on Microsoft IIS. Their work has been a success so far, and with a new WINCACHE version 1.1 coming up they also seek to integrate their PHP caching functions with open source projects like Joomla!.

While Microsoft of course stays a big bad wolf in sheeps clothing, kudos are certainly in place - surely a better performance of Joomla! on Microsoft will make the popularity of Joomla! grow even more.