Making the Web 2.0 Faster for Next Generation

Abstract

Undeniably the most favored web scripting language is PHP. Almost 80% of the internet’s server-side web applications are written in PHP which includes big giants like WordPress, Wikipedia, and Facebook. In present-day, at an accelerating pace, the quantity of digital content is burgeoning. A heterogeneous set of users' devices is being amassed by these contents and administering these contents manually is an infeasible solution engendering an increasing set of problems. A solution to this problem would be to switch to a web programming language, which can be compiled. We are describing an easy to deploy and a continuous conversion mechanism for converting existing Web 2.0 PHP application systems into Facebook’s HHVM supported Hack server-side application systems. We are trying to use the power of Hack language and amplify the performance of existing PHP server-side applications. Instead of interpreting all of your code Hack translates it to assembly and runs that instead, which can lead to an immense amount of increase in performance. We are using Hacktificator, a tool developed by Facebook Developers and our demo web application running on HHVM to test and convert user’s existing PHP codebase to Hack language. With this proposed methodology we do not have to make any change to existing codebase manually or hire new engineers for the conversion, nor do we have to take down our live systems. Conversion can be done on the fly and will result in approximately 2x to 20x better performance. The availability of this tool can save costs for manual conversion, save time as well as improve the user experience of websites with better performance.