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

PHP Streams API


If we want to work with sockets in PHP, we're offered two sets of methods, starting with one of these two prefixes:

  • socket_*: Low-level API to the socket communication available since PHP 4.1. This extension needs to be enabled when compiling PHP with the --enable-sockets option. You can check whether your PHP supports this API by running php -i in the console and watching for --enable-sockets under the Configure Command option.

  • stream_*: API introduced in PHP 4.3 that generalizes usage of file, network, and other operations under a unified set of functions. Streams in the sense of this API are resource objects that share some common behavior. This extension is part of PHP and doesn't require any extra steps to be enabled. More stream functions were added in PHP 5, such as stream_socket_server(), which we'll use in a moment.

In general, we'll always want to use the newer stream_* API because it's a built-in part of PHP and offers better functionality.

The core feature is that...