PHPEverywhere has an interesting new post this morning about bridging the gap between PHP and .NET with a handy little tool called XML-RPC.

A couple of months ago, I mentioned that we are developing rich Windows clients running on .NET. We are still using PHP on the web server, and using XML-RPC for communication between .NET and PHP. We could have tried to use SOAP, but at that time there were too many deficiencies in NuSOAP's support of arrays and collections.

They tried moving into the built-in XML-RPC functionality in PHP, but saw almost no performance increase. They came up with some surprising numbers, especially in the "networking/apache overhead" section of things. They even tested it locally on a Windows machine and came up with better results for IIS than with Apache.