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phpstack - A TCP/IP Stack and Web Server in PHP

Posted by michael on from the recursive dept.

Adam Dunkels writes "Following the trend of writing 'inappropriate' programs in the PHP scripting language, I have written a small TCP/IP stack and a web server entirely in PHP. It is extremely stripped down: the IP stack only implements the most basic functionality required for running the web server and the web server cannot handle pages larger than 1.5k. Nevertheless, the stack is able to support an unlimited number of simultaneous TCP connections and the web server has support for PHP scripting. A live demonstration server is up and running the phpstack software."

3 of 295 comments (clear)

  1. Due to the anticipation of the /. effect . . . by dgrgich · · Score: 5, Informative

    Here's a screenshot of the phpserver results. Pretty cool stuff.

  2. Re:I don't get it, really I don't by madstork2000 · · Score: 5, Informative

    PHP does not depend on a webserver to run. It can be executed standalone just fine. I use it that way as a PERL replacement. No need for flame wars, I do still use PERL , the PHP stuff is for "backend" scripts on my webservers that share some common custom PHP libraries I have written as part of web applications, in so doing I eliminated the need to reimplement a lot of logic in PERL...Anyway that was off topic, the point is PHP does NOT need a webserver to run.

    MS2k

  3. From the author by dunkels · · Score: 5, Informative

    I am the author of this and I must point out that the phpstack server is actually still running after over two hours of slashdotting! It is extremely slow, however, because of the insane amount of IP packets that have to traverse the 115200 bps serial line that connects the server with the rest of the world. The front page of the server currently reports that it has served 13157 visitors.

    A lot of people that comment here focus solely on the web server part of this software and completely miss the novel part in this: the TCP/IP stack. Writing a simple web server is dead easy. To the best of my knowledge, however, nobody has been stupid enough to write a TCP/IP stack in PHP before :-). The web server running on top of the stack is really simple and can be seen as the equivalent of the "netcat" web server someone suggested.

    The TCP/IP stack is intensionally extremely simplified (or "half-baked", if you wish) and tailored to the specific needs of the simple web server. Someone implied that the reason for the simplifications was that I maybe hadn't "figured out" how to handle fragmented packets. Well, it does not have to do with packet fragmentation (IP fragmentation is not that much of an issue today), but with the TCP receiver not trying to put together incoming TCP segments into a stream. Interested people could take a look at my uIP or lwIP TCP/IP stacks to see how to solve these problems in the general case. I have also written a paper that discuss issues with reducing TCP and IP in more detail.

    Of course, there are also the standard "this guy should get a life" comments. I always find it amusing to see such comments being posted only 10 minutes after the article hit the Slashdot front page, on a Saturday. I'm not the only one in need of a life, it seems :-)

    Finally, all of this is just a quick hack made solely for fun (and in part to learn more about PHP). I submitted it to Slashdot simply because I enjoy seeing articles like this myself. From the insane amount of traffic to my demo server, it seems that quite a lot of other people find it interesting as well :-)