Quercus

Sam Heisz

Caucho Technology

About Caucho

• Formed in 1998
• Initially javascript on the server
• Resin first released in 1999
• Quercus released in Decemeber, 2005

About Resin

• Web server
• Servlet, JSP, JPA, JMS, transactions
• Excellent performance
• Minimal configuration
• Static files faster than Apache (3x faster on 1k files, slightly faster for 64k files, slightly slower for 7 meg file)
• GPL

About Resin Professional

• Adds features to Resin typically needed in large production environments
• Clustering
• Distributed sessions
• Low level JNI for performance enhancements
• OpenSSL

About Quercus

• 100% java implementation
• Compiles PHP to java bytecode
• 100% reimplementation of the PHP libraries

Threading

• One process
• Thread based and thread safe
• Each request is allocated a thread
• Requests can use resources with a longer lifetime than the lifetime of the request

Compilation

• First request runs in interpreted mode
• Compilation occurs in background
• Optimizing
• Target is Java bytecode

Java and the JVM

• Bytecode, hotspot compiling to native code
• Garbage collection
• No pointer and buffer overruns
• Very large standard library

Quercus language

• PHP 5
• Unicode
• Black box testing of PHP implementation
• Ability to add closures

Quercus library

• Complete reimplementation of the PHP library
• Uses existing Java and Resin library whenever possible
• Database library uses Java database drivers and API

Use case: alternative PHP implementation

• Homogenous environment
• Excellent performance, 4 to 6x faster than mod_php, 10% faster than eaccelerator
• Database pooling
• Distributed sessions

Database connection pool

• Establishing a TCP connection is expensive, connection pooling keeps connections open for subsequent requests
• Resin's connection pool is very robust
• Prepared statement cache
• Resin defaults are based on experience, little need to tune

Getting started

• Automatic recognition of .php files
• Database pooling is automatic
• No need for a compilation step, library is always available

Use case: extending PHP

• Quercus enables the use of Java objects and methods
• PHP programmer uses PHP semantics
• Allows targeted implementation or reimplementation of functionality
• Objects can exist beyond the lifetime of a single request
• Objects can be shared amongst requests

Use case: extending PHP

package example;

import com.caucho.quercus.module.AbstractQuercusModule;

public class HelloModule extends AbstractQuercusModule {
  public static String hello_test(String message)
  {
    return "Hello, " + message;
  }
}

Use case: extending PHP

example.HelloModule

Use case: extending PHP

<?php echo hello_test("World") ?>

Use case: using available Java functionality

• Java persistence architecture
• Spring framework
• JMS
• Transactions

Status

• Runs many PHP applications (i.e. MediaWiki, Drupal, Mantis)
• Primary task is to implement the complete library
• Unicode
• Out of beta in September

Summary

• 100% java implementation
• Compiles PHP to java bytecode
• 100% reimplementation of the PHP libraries
• Easy to extend PHP with Java
• Easy to integrate Java
• http://www.caucho.com