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 pthreads extension


Since the year 2000, PHP can be compiled as thread safe, which allows any process to run multiple instances of the PHP interpreter in multiple threads (one thread per PHP interpreter). Each PHP interpreter has its own isolated context which doesn't share any data (the "share nothing" philosophy) with others.

This is commonly used in web servers such as Apache (depending on its modules). Apache creates multiple subprocesses where each subprocess runs multiple threads with multiple PHP interpreters. Running interpreters in threads instead of subprocesses has its advantages and disadvantages.

Creating only threads is significantly faster and doesn't consume as much memory as creating subprocesses.

An obvious disadvantage is isolation. Even though all PHP interpreters run independently in threads, if any of them causes, for example, a "segmentation fault" error, then the entire process and all of its threads are terminated immediately. This even includes threads that didn...