Category / Talks

by Kévin Dunglas

Webperf: PHP after Server Push

Here are the slide deck from the talk I gave this morning for AFUP Day 2021! And here is the video (in French):

Google recently announced that it will remove Server Push support from its flagship browser. Server Push is a technology that is part of the HTTP/2 and HTTP/3 standards. Server Push is designed to improve the performance of websites and web applications. Server Push is widely implemented in the PHP ecosystem: it is natively supported by most web servers as well as popular tools such as Symfony and API Platform. It is also the core of the Vulcan specification which allows creating very powerful and easy to cache web APIs.

The engineers at Google propose to use three technologies to replace Server Push, which they believe would be easier to use and implement and would allow performance gains almost similar to those of Server Push. These technologies are the Preload links, the HTTP return code “103 Early Hints” and the WebTransport JavaScript API. The PHP ecosystem and Vulcain already support the first two. The third one could eventually – if adopted by browsers and web servers – provide a modern (though low-level) alternative to WebSockets.

In this presentation, we will discover the use cases of each of these technologies, we will compare them with Server Push, and we will see how to use them in PHP (both client and server side). We will then see how Vulcain takes advantage of them.

by Kévin Dunglas

[PHPTour/SymfonyLive slides] REST vs GraphQL: illustrated examples with the API Platform framework

GraphQL is an increasingly popular alternative to REST architectures for building web APIs.

The query language promoted by Facebook has undeniable advantages: retrieve exactly what the client need, limitation of the number of queries, strong typing, powerful and extremely well thought out syntax…

However, it also suffers from often underestimated problems including HTTP cache, logs, security or authentication, features that are the basis of the today’s web stack. GraphQL is also a non-standard format that requires a specific parser.

In addition, modern REST-based hypermedia formats such as JSON-LD or JSON API have features very similar to those of GraphQL (and more advanced ones) while remaining compatible with the fundamentals of the web.

The API Platform framework, based on Symfony, makes it easy to create REST APIs (JSON-LD, JSON API, HAL …) just like GraphQL.

After listing the advantages and disadvantages of different formats, we will study through different cases of frequent use when it is better to use GraphQL, REST or both in addition.