Run PHP Task Asynchronously

Question

I work on a somewhat large web application, and the backend is mostly in PHP. There are several places in the code where I need to complete some task, but I don\'t want to m

Answer 1

Another way to fork processes is via curl. You can set up your internal tasks as a webservice. For example:

• http://domain/tasks/t1
• http://domain/tasks/t2

Then in your user accessed scripts make calls to the service:

$service->addTask('t1', $data); // post data to URL via curl

Your service can keep track of the queue of tasks with mysql or whatever you like the point is: it's all wrapped up within the service and your script is just consuming URLs. This frees you up to move the service to another machine/server if necessary (ie easily scalable).

Adding http authorization or a custom authorization scheme (like Amazon's web services) lets you open up your tasks to be consumed by other people/services (if you want) and you could take it further and add a monitoring service on top to keep track of queue and task status.

• http://domain/queue?task=t1
• http://domain/queue?task=t2
• http://domain/queue/t1/100931

It does take a bit of set-up work but there are a lot of benefits.