{"id":3073,"date":"2025-07-06T23:23:40","date_gmt":"2025-07-06T22:23:40","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/chewett.co.uk\/blog\/?p=3073"},"modified":"2025-07-06T23:24:06","modified_gmt":"2025-07-06T22:24:06","slug":"celebrating-30-years-of-php-highlights-from-jetbrains-phpverse-2025","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/chewett.co.uk\/blog\/3073\/celebrating-30-years-of-php-highlights-from-jetbrains-phpverse-2025\/","title":{"rendered":"Celebrating 30 Years of PHP: Highlights from Jetbrains PHPVerse 2025"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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This year I (virtually) attended Jetbrains PHPVerse 2025 celebrating 30 years of PHP. I have written about two sessions which most interested me.<\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n

30 Years of PHP<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

To celebrate 30 years of PHP, Jetbrains brought together a number of speakers to talk about PHP’s past successes and the future of the modern PHP ecosystem.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The full set of videos are available: https:\/\/lp.jetbrains.com\/phpverse-2025\/<\/a> https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/playlist?list=PL0bgkxUS9EaI6rjDdRvihJn90OztDsxTO<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

In this blog I will talk about two of the talks that I found most interesting, FrankenPHP and MCP in PHP.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

FrankenPHP: The future of PHP?<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
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This talk was presented by K\u00e9vin Dunglas and gave an overview of FrankenPHP, a modern high-performance PHP Application server. The talk can be viewed here: https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=k-UwH91XnAo<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Historically PHP applications have been run using NGINX+PHP-FPM or apache+mod_php. These integrate well into modern webserver’s however the PHP ecosystem has been lacking a “first class” application server.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This is where FrankenPHP comes in, with some added bonuses too.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

FrankenPHP integrates the entire PHP engine as a module in GO allowing for considerably faster performance. Alongside this it bundles Caddy, allowing you to easily integrate PHP and the webserver to your app. Since these are both native Go projects they are able to work in tandem using Goroutines and channels to communicate.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In addition to being fast, deployment of FrankenPHP is easy. A docker project is available to bundle whatever your project needs. This allows each project to run with it’s own PHP version and not contaminate your global packages.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Worker mode – Making your PHP even faster<\/h3>\n\n\n\n

FrankenPHP enables loading your application into memory and then continually serving requests without reloading. This differs from standard PHP-CGI processes repeatedly loading your application and state as requests are made.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This works by utilising goroutines and channels to communicate across the various processes. Each goroutine will serve many requests over it’s lifetime. This is achieved by keeping the global application state in memory but resetting it each time it serves a request.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This can be enabled by specifying a worker file which will be loaded by the webserver and handle requests. This is natively supported by Symfony, Laravel, platform.sh, and numerous other libraries.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Go Extensions in PHP?!<\/h3>\n\n\n\n

As FrankenPHP integrates PHP using Go, this enables an exciting ability to integrate Go into PHP. Native Go code can be added to create high performance extensions natively callable by your PHP. This also enables you to integrate existing go libraries into PHP.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

These Go extensions can run concurrently and share data between requests, allowing for further performance improvements by delegating some of the PHP work to Go.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Summary<\/h3>\n\n\n\n

As part of the 30 year PHP celebrations the PHP foundation announced that FrankenPHP was being officially adopted. To me this makes it clear that the PHP foundation sees this as the future webserver of modern PHP. The ability to integrate Goroutines into PHP directly will enable further performance improvements over the already impressive speed boost Go provides.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

MCP in PHP<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

This talk was given by Marcel Pociot and he gave an overview of the MCP is and how it could be built using PHP. The talk can be viewed here: https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=T22_rXew72M<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

First he explained that MCP stands for:<\/p>\n\n\n\n