There are a lot of talks today about “Built-in web server” [for PHP] RFC by Moriyoshi Koizumi. There is a nice discussion on Hacker News (and 2 threads on reddit: here and here). So, here’s couple of cents from me.

1. That is a great addition to the standard PHP tool-set. I remember days, when I had to configure web-servers to run my web-projects and it was ridiculously distracting. It’s not “rocket science”, but still complicates matters a lot. Finally, developers would be able to forget about these monstrous WAMP/XAMPP/whatever packages and just run their applications using “php -S localhost:8080”.

2. Dear developers, please, do not expect this to handle production load. This web-server is solely for localhost developer needs. It is a single-process, single-threaded, blocking http-server.

3. If you’re looking for the solution, which is similar Ruby’s Rack or Python’s WSGI this is not it. But AiP (formerly ”AppServer in PHP”) is: it lets your application pre-initialize classes (and keep them in memory between requests), pre-open database connections, pre-warm caches, etc. and serve application with a fast multi-processed server (you can choose from HTTP, SCGI and ØMQ/Mongrel2 protocols). And it is still as easy to start bundled http-server: “aip app path/to/application”

Various versions of AiP are used in production on several large projects and show nice results (it is stable and really fast). And we’re planning to release next major version really soon now. If that sounds interesting, join our discussion group and watch the project on github