I know, I know - The Evil Empire and all - but you still need to be informed about it all. PHPEverywhere has a link to an article over on the Microsoft site that talks about the "new IIS" - how it's more stable, flexible, performs better, etc... Features such as Remote administration, caching, and metabase improvements, as well as custom isolation and security enhancements, make IIS 6.0 the Web server of the future. Well, we'll see...

<A href=="http://www.zend.com">Zend has a new Code Gallery Spotlight posted today - this one talks about using PHP to communicate with CGI scripts all over the internet. There's not much new here, it's kind of a fun little piece, but nothing that'll change the way you code. They basically show you how to make a raw POST or GET request to a remote script and grab the results that it spits back out. This could be useful for several things out there (I use something similar for a script for work).

And, last, but not least, newbienetwork pointed me to a neat article over on WebMonkey about using transactions in MySQL. Now, from what I've seen, only Oracle has true transactions (correct me if I'm wrong), but MySQL has something similar, thought not quite as powerful. The locking and all that he talks about here is ISAM locking (not quite as good as the ACID locking, but it'll do). While ISAM locks are better than nothing, they are really no substitute for true ACID transactions. He gives you some pseudo code to get your thoughts going on the subject and some sample database layouts as well as a few snippets of the SQL you might need. (This is only part one in the series)