Month: November 2018

RoadRunner – high-performance PHP application server, load-balancer and process manager

RoadRunner is a high-performance PHP application server, load-balancer and process manager, written in Goland.  It sounds like an excellent replacement for the built-in PHP server, and even more than that – it’s production-ready.  And it works on Windows too.

RoadRunner is an open source (MIT licensed) high-performance PHP application server, load balancer and process manager. It supports running as a service with the ability to extend its functionality on a per-project basis.

RoadRunner includes PSR-7/PSR-17 compatible HTTP and HTTP/2 server and can be used to replace classic Nginx+FPM setup with much greater performance and flexibility.

VivaGraphJS – Graph drawing library for JavaScript

VivaGraphJS is a graph drawing library for JavaScript.  It’s a lot prettier than the results of GraphViz dot.  Or at least, it’s easier to get fancy things out of it.  It also ties a lot easier into the web development in general and your DOM document in particular.

CMS Scanner: Scan WordPress, Drupal, Joomla, vBulletin websites for Security issues

CMS Scanner is a security tool from Open Security crew that you can host locally and use for security scans of WordPress, Drupal, Joomla, and vBulletin websites.  I think that having an automated tool like that is way better and more productive than a thousand blog posts on how to secure your installation of a particular software.

PHP 7.3 Performance Benchmarks Are Looking Good Days Ahead Of Its Release

PHP 7.3 is scheduled to be released on December 6th, 2018.  As always, it’ll bring a few changes and new features (read more about it here or here).  But it’ll also bring a significant performance improvement.  Here are the results of a few benchmarks.  Long story short:

PHP 7.3 is just shy of 10% faster than PHP 7.2 in the popular PHPBench. PHP 7.3 is 31% faster than PHP 7.0 or nearly 3x the speed of PHP5.

Bring it on, I say!

Crell/ApiProblem – a simple implementation of the api-problem specification

I’ve been working with REST/RESTful APIs for a while now.  They are usually a lot better than the SOAP or XML-RPC stuff we had before.  But they are also not perfect.  Error handling and reporting is a common area between many implementations that needs more attention and consistency.  Turns out, there is, I’ve just somehow never heard of it – RFC7807 defines “Problem Details for HTTP APIs”.

I’ll need to look more into this and see if and how it is better than a variety of things I’m using now.  Gladly, there is even a PHP library to help with that – Crell/ApiProblem:

This library provides a simple and straightforward implementation of the IETF Problem Details for HTTP APIs, RFC 7807.

RFC 7807 is a simple specification for formatting error responses from RESTful APIs on the web. This library provides a simple and convenient way to interact with that specification. It supports generating and parsing RFC 7807 messages, in both JSON and XML variants.