Introduction

The objective of the project is to develop a multi-threaded application server for PHP, written in PHP. Yes, pure PHP! You think we're serious? Maybe! But we think, in order to enable as many developers in our great community, this will be the one and only way to enable you helping us. Through the broadest possible support of the PHP community we hopefully establish this solution as the standard for enterprise applications in PHP environment.

Highlights

Servlet engine, with full HTTP 1.1 support
Session beans (stateful, stateless + singleton)
Message beans
Doctrine as standard Persistence provider
Timer service
Integrate message queue
Web services
Cluster functionality

Technical Features

Joe Watkins (https://github.com/krakjoe/pthreads) phtreads Library is used
DI & AO usage within the respective container
Use of annotations to configure beans
Configuration by Exception (optional Usage of Deployment Descriptor possible)

The implementation of a Web application and its operation in the PHP Application Server must be as simple as possible. For this purpose, whenever possible, the utilization of standard solution based on existing components as a, such as Doctrine, are used. On the other hand, with the paradigm Configuration by exception, the operation of an application with a minimum of configuration is needed. So a lot of the use cases is already covered by the default behavior of the respective integrated components so that the developer often does not need declarative configuration information.To appeal to the widest possible community the architecture of the Application Server must be constructed so that as large a number of existing applications can easily be migrated via adapter. Furthermore, the future development of Web applications based on all relevant PHP frameworks by providing libraries is supported.

Requirements

PHP 5.4+ on x64 or x86
ZTS Enabled (Thread Safety)
Posix Threads Implementation
Memcached (2.1+)

The lastest version is only tested with Mac OS 10.8+ and Debian Wheezy. PHP Application Server should run on any PHP version from 5.3+. However segmentation faults occurred in various tests with PHP 5.3.x repeatedly. Meanwhile this can lead to the early development stage of the pthreads library. We actually use PHP 5.5.+ for development.

Installation

Actually we support Mac OS X Mountain Lion and Debian Wheezy. We also plan to release a Windows installer and a RPM package as soon as possible but as we're only Mac users we'll be happy if someone is out there to support us with that stuff. Finally it's possible to build the runtime by yourself. This can be done by cloning our [Runtime Environment] (https://github.com/techdivision/TechDivision_Runtime). We've added two ANT targets create-pkg and create-deb that should do the stuff for you.

Installation on Mountain Lion

To install on your Mac OS X Mountain Lion please download the actual .pkg Package from http://www.appserver.io. After downlaod the .pkg you can start installation process with a double click on the package. To install the software you need to have administration privileges (sudo). After the installation process, that is really simple, you'll find the Application Server software in the folder /opt/appserver.

When the installation has been finished the Application Server will be started automatically. If you need to restart the Application Server, after you've deployed a new app for example, you can use the init scripts sbin/appserverctl and sbin/memcachectl therefore. Both accept start, stop and restart as parameter.

Start your favorite browser and open the URL http://127.0.0.1:8586/demo to load the demo application.

Installation on a Debian Wheezy

If you're on a Debian system you don't need to download the .deb package. Follow these instructions:

root@debian:~# echo “deb http://deb.appserver.io/ wheezy main” >> /etc/apt/sources.list
root@debian:~# wget http://deb.appserver.io/appserver.gpg
root@debian:~# cat appserver.gpg | apt-key add -
root@debian:~# aptitude update
root@debian:~# aptitude install appserver

This will install the Application Server in directory /opt/appserver. Also it'll be started automatically, but you can start, stop or restart it with the init-script /etc/init.d/appserver and the parameter start, stop and restart. Additionally it is necessary that the memcached daemon has been started before the Application Server will be started itself.

After installation you can open a really simply example app with your favorite browser open the URL http://127.0.0.1:8586/demo.

Roadmap

As we're in heavy development it may be, that we've to move some tasks from the following roadmap to a earlier/later version, please be aware of that. If you've ideas or features that definitely has to be in one of the next releases, please contact us. We're always open for new ideas or feedback.

And yes, we've plans for a Community and a Enterprise edition. The Community Edition will provide all functionality needed to develop, run maintain all kind of web applications. The Enterprise Edition will focus on large software solutions that run on many servers and needs real cluster functionality.

Community Edition

Version 0.6 - Application Server

Version 0.7 - Servlet Container

Integrate annotations for session beans
Administration interface with drag-and-drop PHAR installer
SSL Encryption for TechDivision_ServletContainer project
HTTP basic authentication for TechDivision_ServletContainer project
mod_rewrite functionality for TechDivision_ServletContainer project
Add dynamic load of application specific PECL extensions
100 % Coverage for PHPUnit test suite for TechDivision_ServletContainer project

Version 0.8 - Persistence Container

Stateful + Singleton session bean functionality
Container managed entity beans for Doctrine
Webservice for session beans
100 % Coverage for PHPUnit test suite for TechDivision_PersistenceContainer project

Version 0.9 - Message Queue

Message bean functionality
100 % Coverage for PHPUnit test suite for TechDivision_MessageQueue project

Version 1.0 - Timer Service

Timer Service
100 % Coverage for PHPUnit test suite for TechDivision_TimerService project

Version 1.1 - Additional Containers

Distributed and redundant cluster caching system with automated failover
Fast-CGI container
WebSocket integration

Enterprise Edition

Version 1.2 - Cluster Functionality

Cluster functionality
Container based transactions
Farming deployment

About

Thread based PHP daemon to implement stuff like message queues.