Powered by WIMP:Windows, IIS, MySQL, PHP

So I learned a new acronym the other day, Seems the Linux guys have LAMP: Linux, Apache, MySQL & PHP. It’s an extremely popular acronym and everyone knows exactly what you’re talking about the moment you mention it (well in geek circles anyway). The Windows guys that run PHP & MySQL are WIMP.  Well I suppose I should be happy we have our own acronym but it bothers me somewhat. You see on Windows we can run MySQL & PHP, no problem. I also won’t argue that MySQL runs better on Linux because it does. But PHP runs pretty damn good on Windows, in fact it’s generally balls on accurate on windows with very little extra configuration or work needing be done. In fact, this very blog runs on WIMP and isn’t missing any features or functions that any other wordpress blog has. They call that a well engineered platform (PHP) and a damn good system administration (Windows MySQL hosting).

What bothers me a bit is that one would think “oh yeah, it’s windows hosting, that’s WIMPy” when in fact one could argue it’s as versatile if not more so than Linux. As we run PHP & MySQL, PERL, Python, you name it, everything the Linux web guys want to run and we also run ASP, ASP.net and MS SQL.  Now the .NET framework is being ported to the various unix platforms via MONO, but like early PHP ports they lack the performance and functionality that is found on a Windows hosted platform and probably will never have the same performance as Microsoft keeps their special sauce still very secret. So yes I may run on WIMP, but my platform is far from wimpy.