PHP & Web Development Blogs

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A little history

Several years ago I had the distinct privilege of founding Midwest PHP with Jonathan Sundquist. The goal was simple, to bring an affordable PHP conference to Minnesota and the midwest region.

Midwest PHP was created for one simple reason - there weren't a lot of alternatives, especially affordable ones. At the time, your choices were ZendCon in Silicon Valley, php[tek] in Chicago, or Northeast PHP in Boston. While Northeast PHP formed the blueprint of a community conference - it still required a flight and a costly hotel in Boston. I wanted something where local attendees, college students, and those just beginning in their PHP careers could go to learn, network, and become part of the PHP community.

Shortly after Midwest PHP was formed (originally we were using the name PHPFreeze - until Sundquist told me what a horrible idea it was), Adam Culp launched Sunshine PHP which has become one of the top community focused PHP conferences (but still requires that flight and hotel in Miami). Sundquist and I knew that any reasonable developer would still prefer to attend a conference in a blizzard than enjoy the beautiful Floridian weather (ok, that might not be it, but we still understood the need that existed).

After moving to California for my new job, Jonathan Sundquist continued to run Midwest PHP as more community conferences appeared. With his efforts, and the torch being passed to Mike Willbanks, Midwest PHP celebrated it's seventh consecutive year, becoming the longest continuously running PHP conference (if you go by formed date, if you go by actual conference date Sunshine PHP beats us out by a month).

A renewed focus

Because of the incredible work Jonathan and Mike have done, Midwest PHP has stood the test of time - and the peaks and valleys that come with any conference. With the shifts in the PHP community and the sad loss of several community conferences - we realized the need for Midwest PHP is more now than ever, and to meet that need we needed to reimagine the way the conference operated.

We also realized that the best way to make Midwest PHP accessible was to combine forces, creating a seamless partnership between Nomad PHP and Midwest PHP. Through this partnership we're not only able to stream the event to make it more accessible ($19.95/mo), but also expand the conference.

This year, taking place onApril 2-4, 2020 - Midwest PHP will bring together over 800 developers both in-person and virtually! Making this year truly unique, however, and staying with our purpose of helping new developers be part of the PHP community is abrand new, FREE, beginner track. I'm excited to say we will be giving away 200 tickets to those wishing to attend our Beginner or Learn PHP track!!!

We will also work to keep prices as low as possible as we offer our standard PHP tracks (Everyday PHP and PHP Performance & Security) starting at $250/ person, anda brand new enterprise track geared at developers facing challenges at unprecedented scale starting at $450/ person.

Last but not least, it is our goal with the help of our sponsors to include the workshop day as part of your ticket price - allowing you to get one day of in-depth training, and two more full days of sessions. On top of this, we're also excited to make the Nomad PHP and Nomad JS video libraries available for Standard and Enterprise attendees, providing over 220 additional virtual sessions on demand!

For sponsors

Sponsoring a conference is hard. We understand the challenge of gauging ROI, planning travel, and coordinating outreach. With the combined forces of Midwest PHP and Nomad PHP, we're able to offer sponsors unique plans that maximize their investment - while ensuring the funds go back into the event to create an amazing experience for our attendees.

Beyond Midwest PHP's goal to be the largest PHP conference this year - the included Nomad PHP advertising will help you reach a much larger and broader audience, allowing for follow up advertisements and consistent engagement with the PHP community.

Interested in sponsoring? Check out the prospectus

Next steps

For more information, please visit the Midwest PHP website. The venue, call for papers, and additional information will all be posted there soon.

In his talk Websockets in PHP, John Fransler walks us through the use of WebSockets in PHP.

While discussing bi-directional real-time application development, John notes that PHP is often not invited to the table due to its lack of native support. Of all the possible attempts to bring in PHP on this stage of real-time development, Ratchet, a PHP WebSocket library, comes closest. "Ratchet is a loosely coupled PHP library providing developers with tools to create real-time, bi-directional applications between clients and servers over WebSockets."* Ahem!

Today's dynamic world

In today's dynamic content world of the internet, it is required to serve real-time bi-directional messages between clients and servers. WebSockets are simple, full-duplex, and persistent. They work over Http and are a standard today.

WebSockets have compatibility with 96.5% of clients globally

There's a very high chance your client has the necessary plumbing to access your content via WebSockets. WebSockets gives the ability to have real-time data on to your clients without the need for polling.

To understand WebSockets, John takes an example of a Javascript client and Ratchet Server. Javascript has everything built in to allow access to a socket. For example, you can use the send method on a WebSocket variable to send a message to the server, or if you want to respond to a message from the server, you use the OnConnection method.

While on the Server, John uses Ratchet, which is built on React PHP. A server script is then configured and set up to run and listen on a port for incoming HTTP requests. For messages, JSON is used, and to find public methods, a router is set up. He then goes on to instantiate the server-side script in Ratchet.

There are four functions of a Ratchets message component interface that are used in this example:

OnOpen gets called when a new connection is made.

OnClose gets called when a client quits. It's essential to keep an eye on memory management, and essential to keep tidying up as you move through the code.

OnError gets called when there is an exception faced by the user.

OnMessage gives the text of the JSON message, which is being exchanged with the client.

For Initialization, Jason continues to walk through the example. He shows how one can loop through the clients, both inside the server and outside the server. Outside the server, it’s a feature of React PHP. On database access, and with traditional standard synchronous MySQL in PHP, what usually happens is that it forces the code to wait for the query to return a result and do nothing — Fortunately, with Asynchronous MySQLi, that is not the case.

John gets into the details explaining Variables, References & Pointers. He also gives a demo where a central site has updated information on the Bitcoin and ether prices. A client terminal reflects the last values. Now the client doesn't have to poll the server for new values. When there is a change in the Bitcoin or ether values, the server pushes down the client's update. No polling helps with a lot of overheads and gets closer to real-time.

Using Supervisord

For Long-running applications - Jason recommends running a supervisord, use proxy to expose the port, and add a site certificate. Supervisord keeps an eye out for the server running the service; it can be used to restart the service and log any service issues. Recommended proxies are AWS load balancer, Nginx, and HA Proxy. For scalability, use multiple smaller WebSocket servers and a smaller number of clients per server used and load balancing. If one has to support a chat feature to allow clients to talk to each other in near real-time, it is recommended to use Redis. The Redis server proxies the messages between the server nodes.

The talk concludes with John summarizing best practices on error handling and takes QnA on various aspects of WebSockets such as handling load balancers and asynchronous calls to MSQLi.

The presentation for this video, along with the code, is hosted at John Curt's GitHub. More info about John's current areas of interest can be found on John's Blog.

Watch the video now

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