The SitePoint PHP blog has posted a new article comparing AppServer and Symfony on a performance level and wonders if the AppServer platform can outperform the framework on some base level functionality.

After the release of the first part of our Appserver series, it was clear through the ensuing discussions on both SitePoint and Reddit that we had touched a nerve for a good number of PHP channel’s devoted readers. I also quickly realized this new (for PHP) technology had a good number of serious doubters. One of the most poignant responses in the discussions was something along the lines of,

Needless to say, those doubtful and critical comments sounded like a real challenge. I was also very interested in finding out where appserver would land, if it were to be benchmarked against another well known PHP framework. [...] I decided to use my favorite framework, Symfony, to make the comparison. This is because appserver, as a stock PHP application server, also offers a good bit of important application functionality similar to Symfony.

They start with the approach they took to the comparison and how they set up the systems to evaluate the difference between the two (including hardware specs). The remainder of the post shares the results of several Apache Bench runs - the raw command line output - and more graphical versions of the same information (bar graphs). While there are a few "wins" on the AppServer side, overall it came in a bit slower (mostly because of the technologies involved in every request, however).

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.

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.

On the SitePoint PHP blog there's a new post interviewing the company behind Appserver.io, an application server written for PHP and in PHP.

What if you could reliably run PHP without Nginx or Apache, but also without relying on its internal server? What if you could do async operations in PHP with true multi threading, fully taking advantage of multi core processors without hacks or a jungle of callbacks? What if you had drag and drop installation support for your PHAR packaged web apps in an environment identical to its production counterpart? Enter Appserver (application server).

They talk with Tim Wagner, Johann "Hans" Zelger and Stefan Wilkommer about the tool and what kinds of features it has to offer PHP developers. There's mention of "servlets", configuration of the platform and the results of some of the benchmarks they've run comparing it to other web servers. There's lots more in the full interview so be sure to check into it if you're intrigued by this interesting addition to the PHP world.