Imagine a world where clients will give up on receiving responses from your application in mere seconds, where failed emails will give rise to complaints and lost business, where there exist tasks that must be performed regularly regardless of how many requests your application receives. This is not a fantasy world, it’s reality. In the real world your application must be responsive, reliable and capable of recovery from errors. These are obvious needs but all too often applications fail to realise them. Sometimes, developers even fail to realise they should even be concerned about them.
To offer an opening real-world example, I’ll borrow from a recent discussion I had concerning the Pubsubhubbub Protocol. If you are unfamiliar with Pubsubhubbub (PuSH), it’s a protocol which implements a publish-subscribe model where the publishers of RSS and Atom feeds can “push” updates to a group of Subscribers. The pushing is handled by an intermediary called a Hub which is pinged by the Publisher when they update a feed, and which then distributes the update to many Subscribers using a Callback URL they each have declared.
For the full story, visit http://blog.astrumfutura.com/archives/417-The-Mysteries-Of-Asynchronous-Processing-With-PHP-Part-1-Asynchronous-Benefits,-Task-Identification-and-Implementation-Methods.html
