Day Camp 4 Developers: Beyond Performance
18 Jan 2019 at Online

Take a peek into the inner workings of PHP from how it walks through your script code, to the nature of variables themselves. This session will focus on some of the subtle but significant changes between PHP 5 and PHP 7 as well as look forward to the future of PHP 8.

Over the years, software teams have questioned if PHP is a good choice for building web services. In this talk, I will show how we use PHP on the backend for Glu Mobile’s flagship mobile game Design Home, enabling it to regularly rank amongst the top free mobile games – both in downloads and grossing. We will deep dive into the thought processes, development, and integration strategy, and study a few real-life cases to show how to use PHP in the right way to build and maintain reliable, high-performance backends.

6

The rise of Node.js has many developers interested in asynchronous web application development, as it allows offloading heavy processes in order to provide snappy responses to clients. How can you achieve this in PHP, particularly with Expressive? The Swoole extension to PHP gives us an async foundation; in this session, you’ll also learn how to code your middleware, handlers, and their dependencies so that they play well in an async environment, allowing you to leverage its scaling and performance benefits.

PHP has graduated into being an all-around decent general-purpose programming language. But we still use the same old architectural patterns when we write applications. In “Event Architectures”, I walk through why relying on blocking contexts is less efficient and provide examples of how to re-think program flow to achieve far higher throughput and CPU-consumption density than ever before.

So you built a successful app. The next step is “scale”. But what you really mean is speed – Ludicrous Speed. Let’s explore a making super fast app build in native PHP (no frameworks) running atop nginx, and using Redis as our runtime database. We’ll take a peak at how on the surface this may be a PHP app. Yet, underneath it’s a high-performance, horizontally scalable app.