A few weeks ago, I spent a week at Microsoft Headquarters in Redmond, Washington representing web2project and working on SQL Server support. During the week, many people asked me variations of:
Why? What are you thinking? Are you dropping MySQL support? What in the world are you doing?
In some cases, their questions seemed more panicked that anything. To clarify what is going here, let me explain:
First of all, no, we are not dropping MySQL support. To be blunt, that would be dumb of us. Our community knows and loves MySQL. It’s installed on something like 103% of the web servers out there. For years, it has served as the foundation of web2project and we don’t plan to drop it.
Next, with respect to Microsoft.. their relationship with the Open Source community has ranged somewhere between global thermonuclear war and that awkward guy on the wall at prom. In some places, they’re doing good work while in other places, people are still aiming missiles. Regardless, some groups within Microsoft have worked hard to build positive, productive relationships with the PHP community.
Therefore, our goal is obvious. The goal was SQL Server Compatibility.
Our Vision for web2project is that we take over the world it can be installed into any company’s infrastructure and *poof* it works. Our users shouldn’t worry that their IT staff only supports SQL Server or prefers Apache over IIS or runs Ubuntu instead of Redhat. They just want their tools to work and we want web2project to be one of those tools, so the need was clear.
With that, I’m proud to announce that as a result of this week’s efforts, we believe we have full SQL Server support in the core system. I don’t (and won’t) know the compatibility of the Add On Modules, but if they’ve followed our suggestions in the Module Building Guide, they should be pretty close already.
My personal goal is to have SQL Server support ready for production use in the web2project v3.0 release this winter with at least one beta and one release candidate before then. If you know how to run SQL Server and would be willing to test, please contact me at caseydk [at] web2project.net and let me know. Any and all feedback is appreciated.
Disclosure: I have worked for Microsoft numerous times in the last few years and I continue to work with them in both paid and unpaid roles. Regardless, when they do something right, I applaud them. And when they do something dumb, I challenge them.
