Phalcon is a web framework written as an extension PHP seeking to improve the performance, taking advantage of low-level resources that no other traditional framework can take. Phalcon is a full stack framework, also providing a Micro approach, a template engine called Volt, the first ODM and ORM for PHP written in Zephir/C and many other components that ease the life of developers when creating web applications. Initial versions of Phalcon were created using C directly as main language. Given the framework success many developers were willing to help, however it required C knowledge and PHP internals expertise, this made it difficult for them the possibility of help. Since Phalcon 2, we started using Zephir, a brand new, high-level and compiled language created by the core team, that made our collaborators can help out easier to our project making it robust and stable. Best of all, Zephir allows the easy creation of extensions for both PHP5 and PHP7. An extension can sometimes improve performance, reduce overall memory and processor usage and protect intelectual property. The talk will be about the project evolution, Phalcon 3 as framework and the advantages of using Zephir for building extensions, also success cases and best practices in terms of performance.

1. Phalcon 3.0 & Zephir
Andres Gutierrez
Phalcon

2. About me
● PHP Developer
● More than 10.000 hours programming

3. A FRAMEWORK FOR
PHPDELIVERED AS AN
EXTENSION

4. Some time ago...

5. Phalcon 0.1.x/0.2.x
A group of nerds trying to make a full stack C framework work for the first time
Year: 2011
Social Networks: 0
Look everyone!, it’s a
pointer
Let’s try to call a PHP
function from C

6. Phalcon 0.3.0
First public release
Basic functionality working
Released: 2012
Social Networks: 45

7. Phalcon 0.5.0
Single-module apps, Dependency Injection, PHQL, Micro apps, CLI and more
Only MySQL/PostgreSQL databases were supported
Released: 2012
Social Networks: 400

8. Phalcon 0.6.0
Volt template engine & MongoDB support
Released: 2013
Social Networks: 700

9. Phalcon 1.0.0
Full MVC Applications (Single-Module, Multi-Module and Micro Applications)
ORM (Transactions, Behaviors, Relations, PHQL, Events, Validations,
Hydration, Logging, Profiling, Sharding)
Annotations, escaping, encryption and more
Released: 2013
Social Networks: 2100

10. Phalcon 2.0
Core was rewritten in Zephir
Full backwards compatibility with Phalcon 1.x
Released: 2014
Social Networks: 6700

11. Zephir

12. Zephir
The main goals of Zephir are:
● Static/Dynamic typing
● Automatic memory management
● Strict and explicit behavior over flexible and implicit behavior
● Produce object-oriented libraries that can be used in PHP
● Hide unnecessary complexity to developers
● Make the code more debuggable
● Produce exceptions in runtime instead of notices/warnings when possible
● Detect potentially slow or unreachable code and notify the developer about it
● Provide a very low learning curve without creating a new PHP/C implementation

13. Zephir

14. Zephir
● Create extensions for PHP 5 and PHP 7
● Create DLLs for Windows
● Create Shared Objects (.so) for Linux/Unix
● OSX support

17. NGINX: 9,000 req/s (serving a plain html file)
NGINX + PHP7: 5,000 req/s (serving a hello world)
NGINX + PHP7 + Phalcon: 2,500 req/s (serving a hello world from a controller)
NGINX + PHP7 + Phalcon + MySQL: 800 req/s (serving some data from the database)

19. Real performance best practices
● Cache everything apc, redis, memcached

20. Real performance best practices
● Scale your sessions up

21. Phalcon 3.0.0
PHP7 support
Removed old APIs
LTS extended support
Released: 2016
Social Networks: 12,800

22. Gracias/Thanks!
Questions?