PHP Programming for Windows (Landmark (New Riders))

PHP's File and Directory Functions

As you learned in Chapter 3 "PHP Programming," versions of ASP prior to .NET (hereby referred to as classic ASP) differs from PHP in many ways. Classic ASP has a high reliance on its COM containers, and the file functions for classic ASP are provided via the scripting runtime COM container. This means that any classic ASP language using the file functions must first call on the file system object of the scripting runtime COM container before it can make use of those functions.

PHP, meanwhile, uses file functions that are compiled into the Zend engine. However, it is possible to call on the same scripting runtime via PHP's support for COM (see Chapter 7, "PHP, COM, and .NET").