Topic: Q&A 2010: Microsoft and PHP

[subtalk]

Dedicated discussion space for the following questions:

How does Microsoft plan on overcoming the minority of negative views about the company's products in some circles?

How does php performance compare with a LAMP stack on identical hardware?
Can Virtual Sites have different php.ini configurations?
Can php's mail work 'out the box' on IIS and Windows? How are the permissions handled and what features does it provide?
Can multiple versions of php be run together on Virtual Sites?
Why would I (a non-enterprise user) choose a Windows web stack if I don't already own a Windows Server license?

Regarding PHP and MS Office connectivity:

Further to a question which was posed during last year's Q&A, one of the things that was mentioned in Microsoft's Open Source Mission Statement was support for reading and writing of Word and Excel documents....I was basically wondering:

Has any progress been made on this?
What are the (likely) dependencies for this? Would it require an IIS server? A windows system with MS Office installed? Could it be run under Linux?

[ChrisPucci]

Can php's mail work 'out the box' on IIS and Windows? How are the permissions handled and what features does it provide?

I see that a few of your questions have been answered in other threads, so I'll answer this one here.

Yes, php's mail function works on IIS and Windows using IIS's SMTP Relay. It does require making some basic configuration changes in IIS and php.ini, but they are fairly straight forward. A detailed walk-through can be found here:

http://learn.iis.net/page.aspx/751/configure-smtp-e-mail-in-iis-7/

[Mchl]

Anyone willing to answer about PHP - MS Office connectivity?

[Pierre Joye]

Anyone willing to answer about PHP - MS Office connectivity?

I'm not aware of any project inside Microsoft about providing Office document generation using PHP, for example. I know some other tools (commercial or free) to do that. ExcelWriter or PHPDocx come to my mind right now.

[Mchl]

How about Office document reading?

Generation is not really an issue. However I have a client with several large ( 20MB+) Excel spreadsheets, which contents I want to be able to read into PHP scripts. Any PHP libraries I tried, exhaust all avaialble RAM by trying to load entire spreadsheet at once. Only other solution I've come up with was using COM extension, to basically run Excel to grab required data.

Sorry to hear there's no such project at MS at this time. Where do I fill in feature requests?

[Pierre Joye]

How about Office document reading?

Generation is not really an issue. However I have a client with several large ( 20MB+) Excel spreadsheets, which contents I want to be able to read into PHP scripts. Any PHP libraries I tried, exhaust all avaialble RAM by trying to load entire spreadsheet at once. Only other solution I've come up with was using COM extension, to basically run Excel to grab required data.

Sorry to hear there's no such project at MS at this time. Where do I fill in feature requests?

For recent office formats, it should not be too hard to do it in PHP only, given that the data is XML and the specs are open. Have you tried to do it? Using xmlreader you could even load only part of the data as well.

[Mchl]

Unfortunatelly these are Excel 2003 spreadsheets. I'd love to have them in xml as well...

Somehow it didn't dawn on me, that MS has moved to xml for new Office versions, so it's probably not a high priority to make older folrmats more accessible.

Thanks