Probably you already heard about HHVM . As on their website:
HHVM is an open-source virtual machine designed for executing programs written in Hack and PHP . HHVM uses a just-in-time (JIT) compilation approach to achieve superior performance while maintaining the development flexibility that PHP provides.
Using simple terms – HHVM allows you run scripts written in PHP but much, much more faster. Obviously you the main purpose of HHVM is to run HACK language, but it works pretty good with PHP itself.
Biggest pain point in PHP is lack of asynchronous calls. The only reasonable way is to use some kind of “backend” processing and task list to execute. Some people use cron to run given script each n-minutes and execute tasks. But there is a little bit more “professional” approach. Beanstalk is a simple, fast work queue. Idea is pretty simple – you can just throw tasks into queue and then have background worker which is pulling data from pipe and executes task.
Couple ideas: sending emails, processing images, making heavy queries into database. But the best part of it – you don’t have to use PHP for back processing. It could be anything, because protocol us universal and worker and client doesn’t have to be in the same language. So you can schedule task in PHP, and run it in Go. I’m not going too much into details. Just run some examples.
Throughout this first tutorial, i’ll walk you through the creation of an application with a simple REST API from the ground up. I assume you have Phalcon . installed already.
I’m working on multiple PHP based projects. Most of them using CodeIgniter as a base framework. I mastered it into stage, where has no secrets for me. The problem is that I also know disadvantages of this bit outdated framework. Recently core team announced that they are dropping future development so it means that CI is dead. Doesn’t mean that I don’t like it anymore. I just started looking for something new.
I like CI because I got control over everything. Modern PHP frameworks trying to solve all problems for you. It’s amazing, but lack of control is what you don’t need in when you developing projects. What do you need it’s this easy flow during development process. Full control over your MVC structure, but also a lot of “help” from framework itself.
