The SitePoint PHP blog has posted a new review of Appserver, a "production-ready PHP application server" that includes a web server written in PHP. Appserver is a downloadable project that can be run on any server that already has PHP installed.

You’re probably asking, “Why is appserver paradigm changing?” The answer is, because it tackles the last frontier of PHP application development: high performance for large applications from a server resource optimization and collaboration perspective. This is the realm of PHP development which a good number of professional PHP developers have been calling for, like Manuel Lemos in his “PHP7 Features and Release Date” blog (see the section about a “Standalone Multi-threading Web Server”) and Fabien Potencier, father of Symfony, in his presentation “My Take on PHP”, where he notes he is also working on such an application server solution himself. Well, look no longer Fabien, we already have a really good solution with appsever.io.

In this first part of a new series author Scott Molinari introduces some of the basic concepts behind an appserver in general and helps you get the software installed. He talks about threading and compares the typical PHP server stack against the appserver approach. The main difference is that, with the appserver, there's more control over what's destroyed for each request, allowing more control over the execution and reuse of components. He points out that it does require a bit of different kind of thinking to write code that works with an appserver. He finishes off the post with a few quick steps to getting the latest version of the Appserver build into a local VM via the apt-get package manager and starting it up.