Under its collaboration deal with Microsoft, Zend Technologies has certified Zend Core 2.5, its commercially supported version of PHP, on Windows Server 2008, and that’s supposed to mean that high-performance web applications written in PHP should run as good on the Microsoft operating system now as on Linux or Unix, something that was never true before – even though most PHP development is done on Windows.

By the end of the year, Zend’s entire product portfolio, including its Zend Platform application server for managing and scaling large-scale PHP programs, is supposed to support Server 2008.

The Zend Framework already supports Windows CardSpace, Microsoft’s identity management system. It authenticates PHP applications and allows them to access online services.

Late last year, Microsoft delivered a FastCGI component for IIS, an interface between PHP and the IIS web server – now built into Server 2008 – that upped the reliability and performance of PHP apps running on Windows.