Alexey Zakhlestin's Blog

Programming for Mac and Web

Application Server in PHP? Well… Yes!

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Short story: I made the initial implementation of SCGI protocol in PHP. Check it out! :)

Long story: Some time ago I was ranting about PHP and it’s “way” of handling FastCGI. The idea is to have persistent PHP-application which would handle requests from inside. This would allow us have “real” persistent cache in application (persistent connection to arbitary resources, preparsed XSLT’s in memory) and reply to queries really fast as we wouldn’t need to load all the classes on each request (classes would be loaded only once, during app initialization). And no, APC and similiar technologies do not completely solve this problem.

I finally found some time (and inspiration) to do something in direction of implementing FastCGI the way I see it. Initially, I was going to implement FastCGI-functions in php-extension, but that would require more time than I currently have, so I started with a simplier task: I implemented SCGI protocol (which is way simplier than FastCGI) in pure php-code (which is easier, again, and let’s me change API faster, during development).

This thing already works and you can test it if you have SCGI-enabled server (apache and lighttpd will do) and PHP 5.2.1+ (cli). At first, you need to get latest sources from my google-code project. Sources come with an example.

Some comments to ease understanding:

  • Start by including SCGI/autoload.php file — it will take care of including all SCGI-classes

  • Create your class by extending SCGI_Application. It needs to have two methods: public function __construct and protected function requestHandler. Constructor should call parent::__construct optionally with the stream-url. By default, application will listen on tcp://127.0.0.1:9999.

  • requestHandler is the function which is called by application on every request. This is the point where most of the things should happen. Request-data is available from $this->request() and Response-data should be given to $this->response(). See example for details

  • To see some result you need to tell your web-server, where your application’s socket is. Example for Lighttpd is available in repository

Warning: This is the pre-pre-release. API will be changing.

UPDATE: Code of this project was moved to github: http://github.com/indeyets/appserver-in-php

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