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PHP Espresso Framework

PHP Espresso is a small PHP Framework I created to develop runtime web servers for PHP running CLI programs and scripts. Very similar to frameworks like Express for NodeJS, Gorilla Mux for Golang, etc.

IMPORTANT NOTE: This is just a proof of concept to test the reliability of a runtime web server for PHP, its use and implementation is discouraged for production-level projects as it's an experimental framework for learning purposes.

PHP was designed to be a Single-Threaded Non-Asynchronous programming language, hence, the implementation of these type of web servers is very difficult as there will be always blocking processes for each request, hence, this server/framework is non-scalable.

Table of contents 📖

1. Requirements
2. Installation
3. Usage

• 3.1 Creating a basic web server
• 3.2 Serving a basic static HTML Page
• 3.3 Create a POST request
• 3.4 Complete Rest API CRUD example
• 3.5 Defining middlewares
• 3.6 Asynchronous programming

Requirements

1. PHP 8.0.0 or major
2. Have PHP sockets module installed and enabled
3. Composer
4. Have a initted Composer project

Installation

Install PHP Espresso via Composer:

Usage

Creating a basic web server

Create a server.php file inside your project with the following program:

Run the server:

Visit http://localhost or execute:

And voila! 🎉

Serving a basic static HTML Page

Visit http://localhost/php-espresso-page in your browser.

Create a POST request:

Execute a POST request:

Complete Rest API CRUD example:

Create a couple of users:

Retrieve all created users:

Retrieve user with id 2:

Update user with id 1:

Delete user with id 2:

Defining middlewares

PHP Espresso supports global and route middlewares. You can assign as much middlewares to a single route as you want.

To do so, you can create a new middlewares.php file and add the following code:

If you run:

And do:

Or:

You will get the following message:

If you kill the previous server with CTRL+C and then run:

You will be able to retrieve the users list now, e.g:

To create a new user you need to be authenticated, to do so, assign an encoded Bearer Token using base64 to a variable and then pass the Authorization Header to curl command:

Asynchronous programming

It's still possible to do asynchronous programming with PHP Espresso by creating an asynchronous server and using the async and $next functions and callables:

The async function initiates an Event Looper inside of the listen method when running in async mode by setting $server->async(true);.

async may return a boolean value (false) when the async call is not done yet and returns true or nothing when it's finished.

In this example, the async call inside of the read_file function will return false as long as the requested file is not completed yet, this by reading $bytes as a step for each chunk read through every call inside the Event Loop as an asynchronous process.

Once the whole file is read, the $callable callback will be called, passing in the content of the file on the async call by returning nothing at the very end of the function.

If you execute:

The smaller file request will respond earlier than the larger file request despite of being executed right at the same time.

This could be a way to implement asynchronous programs and libraries for streaming, networking, databases, files, I/O operations, etc, although it's not perfect, it would require a vast work to implement lots of PHP libraries that were designed initially to be Single-Threaded and Synchronous.

Maybe the future of PHP is promising for this purpose with the introduction of tools like Fibers and stuff, but yet, we will see how it goes. 🙂🐘