Book Image

PHP Reactive Programming

By : Martin Sikora
Book Image

PHP Reactive Programming

By: Martin Sikora

Overview of this book

Reactive Programming helps us write code that is concise, clear, and readable. Combining the power of reactive programming and PHP, one of the most widely used languages, will enable you to create web applications more pragmatically. PHP Reactive Programming will teach you the benefits of reactive programming via real-world examples with a hands-on approach. You will create multiple projects showing RxPHP in action alone and in combination with other libraries. The book starts with a brief introduction to reactive programming, clearly explaining the importance of building reactive applications. You will use the RxPHP library, built a reddit CLI using it, and also re-implement the Symfony3 Event Dispatcher with RxPHP. You will learn how to test your RxPHP code by writing unit tests. Moving on to more interesting aspects, you will implement a web socket backend by developing a browser game. You will learn to implement quite complex reactive systems while avoiding pitfalls such as circular dependencies by moving the RxJS logic from the frontend to the backend. The book will then focus on writing extendable RxPHP code by developing a code testing tool and also cover Using RxPHP on both the server and client side of the application. With a concluding chapter on reactive programming practices in other languages, this book will serve as a complete guide for you to start writing reactive applications in PHP.
Table of Contents (18 chapters)
PHP Reactive Programming
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewer
www.PacktPub.com
Customer Feedback
Preface

Introduction to Gearman


Gearman is a framework for distributing work among multiple processes and machines. Due to its functionality, it can serve as a manager, load balancer, or interface between different languages with no single point of failure.

Since this book is about Rx/reactive/asynchronous programming, we're going to cover Gearman fairly quickly. Needless to say, Gearman is very easy to set up and use.

The Gearman PHP extension is written in the C language, so we need to install it via PECL or a package manager relevant to your platform (refer to http://gearman.org/download/ for more information).

Gearman's name is an anagram of the word "Manager" and it pretty well captures its purpose. Gearman doesn't do the work itself. It just receives a task (also referred to simply as a job) from a client and delegates it to an available worker.

The structure of any Gearman application is easily understood from the following diagram:

Diagram from the official Gearman documentation (http://gearman...