[Typo3-dev] Typo3 Application Server

[Bernhard Kraft]

Hallo Robert,

First: Sorry that I didn't read your post. But it was to far down in my newsreader
and I didn't see it.

Robert Lemke wrote:

> Hi Bernhard,
> 
> I have thought about this kind of thing a lot and, so far, concluded 
> that TYPO3 is the RIGHT thing. 
> 
> On the snowboard tour I talked with some people about the idea of creating
> an application server for TYPO3. The discussion also went so far that we
> asked ourselves if TYPO3 should be coded in PHP in the future.
> 
> Some of our conclusions were:
> 
>  - The bottleneck is NOT PHP. PHP is actually quite fast.

Which is also the conclusion I came to after having a "test" chat server ready.

50 Users get handled without real cpu load ...
(my test client uses all the cpu ... so I couldn't test more users)


>  - Writing a deamon in PHP is no problem. You don't need a cron job nor
>    do you have to cheat with timeouts, you can just program a proper
>    daemon with forking and such like you can do in perl for example.

Well ... you will have to mess with timeouts. By default php scripts get timeouted.
So you will have to either reset the timeout all the time so it never occurs or set
it to unlimited ...

But there will be no problem writing a secure daemon which forks when necessary ...


>  - One of TYPO3s bottlenecks is possibly its statelessness. Take the 
>    frontend user sessions as an example: At each page hit we have to
>    query the database for getting the FE session and also write it 
>    back at some point. If we had a daemon which held that information
>    for a certain time in memory, we don't have to have so many DB /
>    file accesses.

It would of course be possible to implement some kind of
"lightweight-database" with such an application server ... for storing
short-term-used records.


> All that would require some event based archtitecture in the core of TYPO3.
> I talked a lot with René about it and we are very confident that we will
> put that into practise. It will also open new doors for controling TYPO3
> remotely via SOAP et al.
> 
> Anyways, what I would like to say is: I'm totally in favour of checking out
> the pros and cons of a PHP based TYPO3 application server, so just go
> ahead, I'll support it in the best way I can.

The only problem I see is cross-plattform compatibilty ... as far as I know
the process control functions (fork) and the IPC functionality is not ported
to Windows/Mac .... so if we want to support all OSes with this extension it
will take a large amount of work ... pherhaps it's even impossible.


I would also be glad to see an standard for and typo3 application server ...
if we have some standards for scripts like the dmailer one it would surely make
the life of T3 programmers easier ...


greets,
Bernhard
-- 
Bernhard Kraft
MOKKA MEDIENAGENTUR GMBH / www.mokka.at
T: +43 1 895 33 33 50