Jaslabs: High performance Software

By Justin Silverton

Phalanger is a new PHP implementation introducing the PHP language into the family of compiled .NET languages. It provides PHP applications an execution environment that is fast and extremely compatible with the vast array of existing PHP code. Phalanger gives web-application developers the ability to benefit from both the ease-of-use and effectiveness of the PHP language and the power and richness of the .NET platform taking profit from the best from both sides.

Using .net classes

Phalanger supports full interoperability with .NET. This means that you can access almost any .NET classes (written in C#, VB.NET and other managed languages) from your PHP applications. This requires adding several features to the PHP language that allows you to use .NET features like namespace (which are used to organize .NET classes) and generics (used for specifying type parameters of methods and classes). These language extensions are called PHP/CLR and are designed to retain dynamic PHP behavior (for more details see PHP/CLR Language Extensions).

Thanks to the PHP/CLR extensions you can easilly integrate existing PHP and ASP.NET applications, or use classes available for .NET Framework in your PHP application. This gives you for example the possibility to modify open-source PHP applications to use the standard ASP.NET 2.0 Membership (user management) system, which is very powerfull option for integrating web applications.

You can also develop new applications using PHP with the PHP/CLR language extensions and combine PHP and other .NET languages (for example C#) in one project. This gives you the possibility to leverage of the C# strictness in the application logic layer where the safety and strict object orientation is important, but use the simplicity and efficiency of PHP language for developing the presentation layer.

Features

• compiles PHP to the MSIL (Microsoft Intermediate Language), which is byte-code assembly used by the .NET CLR.
• Improves execution speed (because of just-in-time compilation)
• use any .NET object in a PHP application
• Visual studio integration: supports syntax highlighting for PHP source files and debugging

Benchmarks

How much faster is it than the standard version of PHP?

Download

The latest version of Phalanger can be found Here