PHP has been in the market for almost. 25 years. As the advancement of the technologies many new backend languages have been introduced mainly for few improvements which include security, speed of development and of coz the speed of the process.
The later languages that were introduced focused on asynchronous processes during the raise of mobile application. Some of the notable one like Nodejs, Go, etc. These are the highly modern popular backend languages used by programmers these days due to their speeds.
Well PHP is still considered a bulky web engine when it compares to the modern languages. While PHP is maintaining its popularity in the market most of the open source systems are still written in PHP. There are several reasons why PHP is still a popular backend language, in my own opinion, there the speed of introducing backend language is still fairly slow compared with frontend language, and PHP still consider pretty stable and the low entry barrier while compare with others.
As there are many PHP programmers in the market, the support and R&D for PHP is still maintaining its velocity, it doesn’t slow down, and we can see there are more improvements in PHP regardless of its speeds and security to catch up to the modern backend language.
One of the biggest improvements in speed for PHP is the asynchronous process. To achieve asynchronous process in PHP isn’t that hard these days, of coz we are also looking forward for asynchronous process to be run in PHP8 https://www.reddit.com/r/PHP/comments/hgpqsp/php80_jit_in_very_promising_for_async_php/ too. If you are interested in PHP8 speed enhancement, you can refer to this article https://stitcher.io/blog/php-8-jit-setup
Some of you might not know what is asynchronous. Imagine you are firing two commands at the same time, the synchronous process runs the first command until it gets the result only it will run the second command, while asynchronous processes run both together.
What are options to make your PHP become asynchronous?
Swoole
Swoole is an open source, production ready async programming framework for PHP. You can run Swoole independently without Apache or Nginx in your server (https://github.com/swoole/swoole-src/issues/1376). For me it looks like web engine + framework to build your PHP application.
Swoole do support Laravel as well if you are interest to turn your Laravel application into asynchronous process. https://laravel-news.com/laravel-swoole or https://github.com/swooletw/laravel-swoole
The video has a very good implication of Swoole in real world
Write async code with spatie async.
https://github.com/spatie/async
Spatie async looks like a 3rd party library for your PHP script. To use it you will only need to install the code package with composer and run the library class in your code. With a few additional lines of code on your function, you can turn it into asynchronous process.
There are many tutorial you can find it in Google, but we recommend one in here https://www.educba.com/php-async/
ReactPHP
Similar like Spatie async you don’t need to install a 3rd party PHP extension in order to run it. Installation will be using composer. We don’t have any proof on which is faster for the time being, but in terms of support, it looks like Spatie async has more community support than ReactPHP.
You can check out the founder of the ReactPHP speech for more info
Others:
https://github.com/kraken-php/framework
http://software.schmorp.de/pkg/libeio.html
We have found what we can find most of the PHP asynchronous framework or plugin or extension that might help you to develop your next asynchronous PHP system for your next project. Sadly these tools aren’t able to convert your existing PHP project into an asynchronous one. Asynchronous processing has its own ways to code which we are not able to convert all existing PHP code methods into asynchronous automatically.
If you are currently facing slow response in your application or website you can always contact us for consultation.