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ReactPHP: Promises

Promises, also known as futures, represent a value that will resolve in the future. In this post we'll tell you about promises, deferreds and useful functions when dealing with sets of promises.

Installation

Promises don't come with and also don't need the event-loop. They come in a separate package and can be used outside async environments:

composer require react/promise
Deferred

A deferred represents an operation that has yet to complete it's unit of work. (For example a DNS query to lookup an IP address for a hostname. Or connecting to a remote service.) It has three state controlling methods:

  • resolve When an operation succeeds.
  • reject When it fails.
  • notify Progress updates (progress before v2.2).
Promises

A promise represents the value of the deferred operation whether it has completed its unit of work or not. Thus the promise acts as a placeholder for the deferred results. Calling Deferred::promise() will get you the promise you return to the calling party. Promises expose several public methods but then is the simplest. It accepts 3 functions as arguments, all optional. (There are more on extended and cancellable promises.)

$promise->then(
    function () { // Success callback },
    function () { // Failure callback },
    function () { // Progress callback },
);
Enhanced timer example

Remember the counter from the timers post? Lets add some promise magic to it. First we create a Deferred instance that represents the unit of work ($i to search 66):

$deferred = new \React\Promise\Deferred();

Sneaking in a notify call in the timer so we know how far in we are:

$deferred->notify($i++);

We also have to resolve once we're done and after we cancelled the timer:

$deferred->resolve();

The timer is set up we just have to 'listen' on the deferred results. We start off by getting the promise from the deferred and call the then method with two callbacks. We'll just ignore the failure callback by passing null into its argument slot.

$deferred->promise()->then(function($i) {
    echo 'Done!', PHP_EOL;
}, null, function($i) {
    echo $i, PHP_EOL;
});

As you can see the first callback just echo's Done! as it didn't receive an value in it's first argument. The second callback is the notify callback and it did get an argument passed. We'll just echo that to show our progress.

That gives us this bit of code:

<?php

require 'vendor/autoload.php';

$i = 0;
$loop = \React\EventLoop\Factory::create();
$deferred = new \React\Promise\Deferred();

$timer = $loop->addPeriodicTimer(0.01, function(\React\EventLoop\Timer\Timer $timer) use (&$i, $deferred) {
    $deferred->notify($i++);
    if ($i >= 66) {
        $timer->cancel();
        $deferred->resolve();
    }
});

$deferred->promise()->then(function($i) {
    echo 'Done!', PHP_EOL;
}, null, function($i) {
    echo $i, PHP_EOL;
});

$loop->run();
react/dns

Lets a look at a more advanced example. The DNS package, react/dns, is an excellent example how promises can be utilized. First we need to install it:

composer require react/dns

(react/dns provides async DNS resolution for react/http-client and others who need it.)

Lets start by creating a resolver we can use to resolve hostnames, we'll use Google's DNS server for it (8.8.8.8) in this example:

$dns = (new React\Dns\Resolver\Factory())->create('8.8.8.8', $loop);

We use $dns in a foreach loop with a bunch of hostnames and call the resolve each time passing the hostname and a callback:

$promises[] = $dns->resolve($hostname)->then(
    function($ip) use ($hostname) {
        echo 'The IP address for ' . $hostname . ' is: ' . $ip, PHP_EOL;
        return $hostname;
    }
);

As you might notice the callback returns the contents of the $hostname after echoing a line. By returning a value (or a promise) in a callback you pass that value on into the next promise in the chain. \React\Promise\all accepts an array of promises and resolves once all the passed promises resolve the resulting values are then pass into the success callback of the returned promise. (You'll find more functions here.) Since we returned a string on each DNS resolved callback we can just implode the array to echo it:

\React\Promise\all($promises)->then(function($hostnames) {
    echo 'Done: ' . implode(', ', $hostnames) . '!', PHP_EOL;
});

The resulting code:

<?php

require 'vendor/autoload.php';

$loop = React\EventLoop\Factory::create();
$dns = (new React\Dns\Resolver\Factory())->create('8.8.8.8', $loop);
$promises = [];

foreach([
    'example.com',
    'blog.wyrihaximus.net',
    'wyrihaximus.net',
] as $host) {
    $hostname = $host;
    $promises[] = $dns->resolve($hostname)->then(
        function($ip) use ($hostname) {
            echo 'The IP address for ' . $hostname . ' is: ' . $ip, PHP_EOL;
            return $hostname;
        }
    );
}

\React\Promise\all($promises)->then(function($hostnames) {
    echo 'Done: ' . implode(', ', $hostnames) . '~', PHP_EOL;
});

$loop->run();

Promise chaining as shown above is a great way of keeping control over your program while running it async. The output of the example also shows react's async nature. Not all domains where resolved in the same order as they where requested.

Community examples

Lets take a look at this weeks community examples guzzlehttp/guzzle and zikarsky/react-gearman. Both use promises to communicate when a task has been completed, whether it's a connection that has been made or a request that received a response.

Guzzle 5.0

Since 5.0 Guzzle supports promises out of the box. This makes it possible to use Guzzle for both sync and async code. As you can see below making the request async is simply passing the future flag into it. (Internally it will use the CurlMultiHandler when ext-curl is installed on the system. So even without a react handler you can make async requests with Guzzle, it just won't integrate with the event-loop.)

<?php

use GuzzleHttp\Client;
use GuzzleHttp\Message\Response;

(new Client())->get('https://blog.wyrihaximus.net/atom.xml', [
    'future' => true,
])->then(function(Response $response) { // Success callback
    echo $response->getBody()->getContents(), PHP_EOL;
}, function(Exception $error) { // Error callback
    echo $error->getMessage(), PHP_EOL;
});
zikarsky/react-gearman

zikarsky/react-gearman uses promises for connections. This is a commonly used pattern among react powered packages dealing with connections. Aside from making it easy to use and see what is going on it also makes it very easy to chain promises together and make connection pools.

<?php

use Zikarsky\React\Gearman\WorkerInterface;
use Zikarsky\React\Gearman\Factory;

$factory = new Factory();
$factory->createWorker('127.0.0.1', 4730)->then(
    function (WorkerInterface $worker) {
        // Connection successful run worker code
    },
    // error-handler
    function($error) {
        echo "Error: $error\n";
    }
);
$factory->getEventLoop()->run();

Simplified example from package examples.

Examples

All the examples from this post can be found on Github.

Conclusion

Promises are a good way to keep you're code from turning into a bowl of spaghetti compared to callbacks. Chaining them enables you to create very powerful systems without losing overview. The examples in this post are just a glimpse of what you can make with them.

P.S.

This weeks article might look short. I've split this post in two and will post the second half in a few weeks once we've had more advanced topics. This keeps the learning curve doable for developers new to ReactPHP.


Categories: PHP - ReactPHP - ReactPHP Series Tags: ReactPHP - Promises - PHP