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.