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The Best Bets for Web Development October 4, 1999 Microsoft Internet Information Server 4.0 
The latest version of Microsoft's IIS is part of the NT Option Pack 4.0. With superior performance across the board, IIS can almost always serve up pages faster than Netscape Enterprise Server or Apache Server. The only exception is its showing in the CGI and scripting tests. This Web server has two shortcomings: the frequent need to reboot and its lack of support for non-Windows platforms. It's impossible to ignore the broad platform support of Apache Server and Netscape Enterprise Server. On the plus side, IIS can point to its mature Web application development platform and superior performance.
Our first task was to make sure we had properly set up our test Web content and the associated application mappings within IIS. Right-clicking on the root of the document tree revealed numerous tabs pertaining to various configuration options for the entire Web site. Application mappings are made at the root of the document tree and affect all files on the site. Unlike our experience with Apache Server, we couldn't disable Web content on a per-application basis for specific directories. We followed Microsoft's performance advice and disabled all application mappings except .asp, .pl and .shtml. During our CGI tests, we initially had some difficulty configuring the ActiveState Perl distribution and the application mapping within IIS. After some searching, we located the proper syntax for the mapping within the ActiveState documentation; however, it would have been slightly more convenient if that syntax had also been included within the IIS documentation. For our scripting tests, we used two different Active Server Page (ASP) configurations. The first test, which used VBScript, proved to be ill-suited for our text-parsing application. Taking advantage of ASP's ability to use multiple scripting languages, we concocted another ASP test, this time using PerlScript. Not surprisingly, the performance results were more than five times greater than those of the VBScript tests. In general, IIS outperformed Netscape on NT, and Apache on Linux, for our server-side include (SSI) testing. However, IIS proved to be on par only with our Perl-based CGI tests with both Enterprise Server and Apache Server. Microsoft Internet Information Server 4.0, $809, Microsoft Corp., (800) 426-9400, (425) 882-8080; fax (425) 936-7329. www.microsoft.com
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IIS is managed with a Microsoft Management Console (MMC) plug-in. Using the console was a snap. Compared to its own WUI and Enterprise Server's, the MMC interface approached management nirvana.Best of the Web
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