Phix Web Interfaces

A mod_phix for apache is needed, although for async-io, FastCGI will need to be used as we can’t multiple conenctiosn itno a single VM with apache architecture.

The Phix engine has been designed to support non-blocking I/O from the core - this means that as logn as you don’t call any blockign functions, you can process all of your Phix web requests from a single VM even when you don’t want to write straight away. This is realy useful for AJAX style blockign requests commonly used for realtime notifications:

 
/*
 * This example 
 *
 */
 
class MyWebApp implements INonBlockingWebService
{
 
  private $requests = array();
 
  /*
   * This method is called on every single request.  If there is an 'ip' and 'msg'
   * GET parameter, then we send the contents of 'msg' to a connection from 'ip', otherwise
   * error with a HTTP 500
   */
 
  function onRequest($req)
  {
 
    if ($req->get->has(array('ip', 'msg')))
    {
      if (!$this->onMyEvent($req->get['ip'], $req->get['msg']))
      {
        $req-header('HTTP/1.0 500');
        $req->print('No connection from this address');
      }
    }
    else
    {
      $this->requests[$req->ip_address()] = $req;
    }
 
  }
 
  /*
   * Called when a request that has not been finished has become disconnected.
   */
 
  function onDisconnect($req)
  {
    unset($this->requests[$req->ip]);
  }
 
  /*
   *
   */
 
  function onMyEvent($ip)
  {
    if (array_key_exists($this->requests, $ip))
    {
      $this->requests[$ip]->print('<somexml/>');
      unset($this->requests[$ip]);
      return true;
    }
    return false;
  }
 
}
 

Another concept that has been included in the phix core is that of continuations.

Continuations allow the program to pause execution at a cettian point, and wind up the whole stack + registers into an object for later continuation