Symfony Finland
Random things on PHP, Symfony and web development
In the previous article in this series we took a look at how different runtimes affect Symfony performance, by comparing PHP 5.6, HHVM 3.11 and PHP 7.0.1. The conclusion was that both HHVM and PHP 7 offer significant improvements in performance without adding server resources. In this article we'll look at how adding them affects performance.
The timespan between launches was PHP 5 to 7 was long, but feature and performance wise there were a number of improvements in the 5.x series. For performance the greatest leap was inclusion of the Opcode cache by default since 5.5.
Benchmarks are the mother of all click baits. They draw people like flies, create controversy and make people jump to conclusions. For raw computation such as video encoding benchmarks can be very effective at demonstrating differences between different technologies.
For the dynamic environment web applications run in, benchmarks rarely represent reality and are more or less synthetic. Yet web benchmarks have got their place to give ballpark figures of differences.
React.js is often thought of as as a front end technology. They can, however be rendered on the server side too - using JavaScript. This naturally turns the scale towards Node.js, but PHP with the v8js installation can handle it too.
Let's see how to merge together v8js and the Symfony Microkernel, making it possible to set the initial state of server rendered components using a PHP backend.
There are plenty of great tools for debugging PHP applications like ones built with Symfony, but catching reasons for slow processes in production can still be a tough cookie.
React is an interface library that is rapidly gaining ground. It can be considered as similar to what Angular and Ember, for example, are. As opposed to Angular and Ember React.js focuses on User Interfaces alone, being neutral on routing and other duties. React can also be rendered on the server side, which is not unique - but very natural to it.