The SitePoint PHP blog continues their series looking at the features of the appserver.io project in this second post covering its server configuration, directory structure and how it handles threads during processing.

In the first part of our Appserver series, we discussed the very high level differences of Appserver’s architecture to standard web server stacks and got you up and running with an Appserver instance.

[...] In this part, we will be exploring the Appserver architecture a bit more in depth. We will go through the concepts of the different contexts and the parts of Appserver you get out of the box, which cover some of the ground most of the popular PHP frameworks offer. We will also configure the web server and look into an application’s structure. Once we are finished, you should have a fair understanding about Appserver’s contexts in relation to threading, the web server, and its setup.

They start with the threading functionality, showing how "contexts" come in to play and how the code executes as long as this context is alive. The post then gets into some of the code-related differences with using appserver such as extra annotation handling and AOP (aspect oriented programming) practices. From there they get into the tech behind the scenes: configuring the web server, setting up a virtual host and pointing it at the sample application. Finally they talk about the servlet engine and the server's directory structure underneath.