CakePHP on IIS6 with FastCGI, SQL Server 2005, and ISAPI_Rewrite

A detailed walkthrough on how to set up and configure a fast, stable PHP 5.x environment on Windows Server 2003 for CakePHP.

Traditionally, hosting a PHP application on a Windows/IIS environment has been a very bad idea due to poor performance and stability. However, due to Microsoft's recent support for PHP on IIS, this is no longer the case! Rather than having to resort to installing and maintaining Apache just for our PHP apps, we can now stay within the x86 Windows Server ecosystem and set up a stable environment for PHP, making CakePHP a viable framework for developers tied to Windows hosting environments.

Become a Better PHP Developer

PHP is probably the most popular web development language right now. At least 20 million domains use PHP and it’s the language used on major sites such as Wikipedia and Facebook as well as in some of the world’s biggest open source projects like WordPress and Drupal.

In this article, I’ll share with you ten things I wish I was told when I was just getting started with PHP development, and I’m hoping you’ll be able to learn a thing or two if you’re just taking your first steps into this awesome web development language.

Speeding Up Your Web Site

Minimize HTTP Requests

80% of the end-user response time is spent on the front-end. Most of this time is tied up in downloading all the components in the page: images, stylesheets, scripts, Flash, etc. Reducing the number of components in turn reduces the number of HTTP requests required to render the page. This is the key to faster pages.

One way to reduce the number of components in the page is to simplify the page's design. But is there a way to build pages with richer content while also achieving fast response times? Here are some techniques for reducing the number of HTTP requests, while still supporting rich page designs.