Simon Hamp discusses the development of Native PHP iOS, a project that allows PHP applications to run natively on iOS devices without needing a web server. He shares the journey from the initial concept of Native PHP to the realization of mobile app development, the technical workings of the application, potential use cases, and future enhancements. The discussion highlights the empowerment of developers familiar with Laravel to create mobile applications and the importance of building a cohesive ecosystem between server and mobile applications.
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So Simon Hamp is back on the show last
time he was here. We talked
about native PHP this time
He's got a brand new thing native PHP
iOS. So welcome back
Simon. Thanks for having me Eric
It's so good to be back. It's good to see
you again. Yeah, you too. So I
Think at first we thought native PHP was
crazy and you're just like
no that's not crazy enough
So we're just gonna go full bore into
mobile development. So so
how did this come about?
Where do I begin? Well, I mean obviously
it starts with native PHP
because none of this would
have happened without that but
Basically last year I was looking into I
was looking into doing something that
probably I shouldn't have
Shouldn't do which is like how can I run?
PHP without a web server behind it and
the reason for that was
kind of like I'm looking into
building all of this stuff for native PHP
for the desktop stuff and
And doing it without web servers and then
it kind of dawned on me
I was like, you know, I think this is
gonna work on a phone because
Now we haven't got to run a web server.
It's so I started investigating all of
that and I'm like, oh
actually I can't run
Like PHP as an a separate executable on
the phone. So I start to investigate like
how do I do this as a
embeddable PHP and
And all these pieces just start to fall
into place and then I'm
like, do you know what?
I think I'm gonna
just hold here for a bit
And I'll just seed a few people with the
idea of like, maybe we can do this
You know talk to Marcel about it
I was like, I think we can do this and we
were at Laricon US and I
mentioned it to a few people
There's some people in the community who
have been on at me like when is it gonna
be ready for mobile?
And I'm like, oh
And I said to them I think I've cracked
it, you know, like I
think we're we're nearly there
and
Coming back from Laricon US. I was like
Well the the Laricon EU
Call for papers, you know call for talks
opened up and I was like, all right
I'll just put a talk in like the really
Smallest brief that I could write for a
talk was like building mobile apps with
PHP and then like months later
I have completely forgot about it. I was
just like, okay, I'm
not gonna do anything
I'm gonna wait till I hear if I get
anything back on this talk
and if they say no, that's fine
But to my surprise Kaneko came back to me
like out of the blue
a couple of months ago
He was just like
really like your talk idea
Do you still want to give
it and I was like hell? Yes
I want to give it but I haven't built any
of the stuff that I
said that was gonna build
So now I've got to go and figure that out
so I finally kind of knuckled down over
like the holiday period and just
Smashed out this thing and I was like
couldn't believe that it actually worked
And yeah, then I started sharing more and
more stuff about it just
like leading up to my talk
so that's kind of how it came to life,
it's probably been a
year in the making and
Quite a lot of work to get there. But
Got the so yes you so basically he by
accepting the talk you had a deadline
So at that yeah, it's had to get
something done, right?
Can echo got his whip out and started
Giddy up
that's funny, so
As far as like the back end
on on how this actually works
So you write in PHP you can
use a lot of wire of course
I guess CSS normal CSS like tailwind or
something and then it compiles itself
into an Xcode thing or
I guess I don't know how that works like
what what actually runs on iOS
So it's an Xcode project that gets
kind of bundled together
But your your Laravel app gets kind of
injected into the Xcode
project and then I'm not like
transpiling any PHP code into
Swift or any other language. It's still
running as PHP code. So
Your actual Laravel project goes on to
the phone and it runs as
PHP would on the server kind of
but on the phone
so it's what's happening is the
PHP engine has kind of been embedded into
the app and so when the app
sees like you're asking it to
Basically kind of make a request to PHP,
you know, which Laravel
does very very by default
It kind of boots up the PHP engine runs
the whole Laravel application through the
engine as it normally
would and then just gets the
HTML and the headers back and kind of
injects all of that response into a web
view and it does it without
Without the web server I'm saying
earlier. So there's no there's no
Processes that are sort of hanging around
on the device trying waiting for
requests. It literally just goes
Oh, there's a you want this I'll spin all
of that up and then finish
that and then here you go
which is
Good, you know like for me that's cool
because now I can take all my Laravel
stuff and I can just do it on the phone
But yeah, this it's not
native in the sense of
You know building a like native UI
components yet, but it could get there
Yeah
what about
I know you said it's sort of like bundles
sort of a version of PHP.
What about like a database like
What's your idea there is
is it gonna be able to like?
Use whatever the iPhone storage is or
you're just like doing more like API
calls back to some other thing
You you've got kind of choices there
I think when when people think about
Laravel they think I can connect to my
sequel or Postgres or
all these other drivers and
But you have to kind of get into the
mindset of I'm
building a client application
You know, my Laravel app is really a
client to something else potentially
I mean, it could be
just completely standalone
But if you're thinking, you know, I want
to run Postgres somewhere
Let's say like you've got a service
running on Laravel cloud
And you've got a Postgres database
you
Absolutely do not want to be connecting
your client applications
Which could be installed on hundreds or
thousands of phones in
theory all to that one database
without any kind of
intermediary so you'd want it to be going
through an API that you've got
authentication going on and you can
Tell who's doing what and you know?
give out tokens that you can expire and
all of those kinds of things and just
have like a good
level of control that the
Database server just won't give you by
default without, you know a lot of work
So in that scenario, you should pretty
much always be thinking
like it's going through an API
But because it is just a file system
On the phone you can have a like a sequel
light database running on there and it
comes with sequel light support
so, you know, and Laravel's done a lot of
work in the last couple of years to
Make sequel light
support like a real first-class
supported solution, so
It's actually great for that now and it
works really really well. So you can have
a local database that you're
Updating with like eloquent models and
you know using
migrations and stuff on the device
Which just feels like
you're right at home in
Classic Laravel world, which is great
That's sweet. Uh, what about so
What is like the best use case
You know
Sort of this is sort of my thinking the
way you're kind of describing it
Like it's never gonna be like you can
never like build little
games or something with it
But it's more like B2B apps
things like that or is it?
Hmm
Yeah, what's your thoughts there the
first app that is you know
The app that I built that went through
the App Store that Apple have approved
Is a game technically. I mean, it's not
like three-dimensional
stuff but
There's actually a project called PHP GL
Something PHP GLFW or
something like that and it's like
They're trying to make open GL
drivers in PHP and all of this
so I can kind of see a point in the
future where that
could be possible because
there's nothing really preventing you
from connecting to the the hardware and
running all of that
kind of I mean, it's just
More maths really, you know, like more
calculations that happening
But should you do that
in PHP I don't know I
Think people will definitely go we're
trying to build a
really performant game here
Let's use like the proper frameworks that
are available on the
platforms whatever but yeah
Business apps. I mean I can see like
potentially businesses that have they've
already got like
their service like a sass
And then they want this kind of side car
Application that's
installable on the phones
So, you know, they might not ever
Sell that app through the store. They
might not ever do anything that kind of
directly generates revenue from that app
But you know, it's a
feature of their entire platform
And then you know
You could get going basically if you had
a team of like one or
two Laravel developers
And he didn't want to invest in hiring
like Swift developers and Kotlin
developers or react native developers
You got a team now that
can build a native app still
with their
Existing Laravel skills, which I think is
super powerful and and cool
But I do think another thing is like
people just have these ideas, you know
They I've talked to friends over the last
few weeks and they're like I've had this
idea for an app and it's like
Yeah, but you know
You don't really know how to code and you
don't know how you're gonna have to learn
all these languages and
tools and things and it's like
I can't build it for them because I
didn't know Swift and I
didn't know these other languages
But now I can because I already know like
Laravel and PHP so I can just go
Oh, actually, let me just you know and a
day later. It's like here's your app
That's quite cool. I
think that's gonna be
Empowering people to kind of try new
stuff out and bring new
ideas to life. Hopefully
Yes, I think that'll be great
I was you know, I was just thinking my
own use case like it'd be sweet just to
have a little little news app
OS app, I don't know
who would download it
But you know it would be neat to have
that as an option at some point, you know
Or a golf app. It's like no, you've
probably got loads of good golf apps
You know, I don't know
It would be cooler to to hook into we've
actually made another
buddy talked about this before
It's like have an iOS app where we can
like video your swing
and then we hook into like
Chat GPT or one of the AI stuff and it's
like this is what you're doing wrong
You should probably work on you know
Here's some training aids and something
like that might be kind of cool and you
could probably do that
through something like this
Because it would just be
connecting through API's
Yeah, I guess because I did see you take
a picture on on stage
So it's definitely possible to hook into
the camera, right? Uh-huh
I mean videos are different beasts
but I think what you know what you're
talking about is essentially like you
capture a bit of video and
then you want your app to
take that file and
Automatically sort of process it through
some other API and get some
data back, you know, it's like
Yeah, you could like
that's just very basic web API
Interaction stuff so you could totally do
that with Laravel now
and that's very very cool
Potential stuff that
could come from this. Yeah
Yeah, I agree and well even you know,
talking about more sale and beyond code,
you know having a tinker
well on your phone that
That could be kind of interesting. I
don't know what you do with it, but you
could play around with PHP
You know as you're as
you're doing something
Yeah, or or more of like an iPad app or
something. I don't know but but yeah,
that's that's very cool
So, so what do you think I know right now
you're iOS only but you do have it that
you're trying to get the Android
Anything else like big that you're
wanting to get done before
before the first release. I
Mean, there's loads of API is that I want
to you know, I'm
working on getting working
so that they're usable and
One of the things I didn't get to do
before my talk which
I hoped I'd have time
But didn't was to kind of
wrap it all up in the nice
We've got quite a nice API now for native
PHP for the desktop stuff and like the
packages are kind of
stable and all of that
So I want to bring some of that stability
across to this kind of straight away
so we get all of that for
free in some respects and
You know, it'll be nice then to have this
you'll have like ID support and all of
the IntelliSense things
are gonna be nice and working
Yeah, I mean I showed off some of the
camera stuff but there's a bit of work to
do to make that
really smooth and get video
And all of those things going but I think
some of those things definitely
But there's a couple of things that come
to the top of the list for people always
push notifications is one
because people basically
people want to be able to
Make the the thing kind of remotely
sensitive to the stuff that's happening
in their application
Environment elsewhere
which makes perfect sense
And another one is in-app purchases. I I
haven't ever looked into stuff like that
before but I think it would be
really cool if you could have a
Laravel app that somebody can go into and
they can just trigger like the you know
Apple pay to purchase something and and
that flow just does what it
does and then I don't know
Maybe it unlocks something in your app or
maybe it's like taking an
order for fast food restaurant
who knows but
Kind of the fact that that then could be
done in Laravel is just
super cool and opens the door to
You know people businesses generating
revenue off of this thing, which is
awesome. So I'd really
like to get that done
But yeah, there's just so much more
there's loads and loads of stuff that I
want to do this is so cool
So so that that does sort of bring
another question in as far as like when
you're developing locally
You can since it's PHP
You can just run like PHP unit pass
Sort of the whole normal testing suite or
you have to like get fancier with how
you're gonna test all this stuff
No, so obviously when you're talking
about like
potentially hitting native APIs
They're not going to be available if
you're just running your test suite in
the terminal because
you're not running on the device
you're not testing on a real device, but
We already have that again in
native PHP for desktop where
You might not be running all of your
tests inside the browser and you know
kind of the web view environment
of electron and so we we basically have a
whole bunch of mocks and
you know fakes that can
Swap in at test time. So yeah, it's not
it's not going to be
testing the real stuff
But it's not going to prevent you from
having really
reasonable tests against those
Apis and kind of what your
expectations are going to be
That's coming through really well and a
lot of that's been thanks to
contributors, you know
Giving of their time and making that
stuff because I haven't
had the time to do that
So, you know
I think at least to that side of things
the communities really come forward and
kind of helped make all
of that possible and I
Think we can take a lot of the principles
of that and bring it over to the iOS
stuff as well. Definitely. No, no doubt
sweet
another question is there any
Sort of performance implications for
using native iOS versus I guess Swift
I assume there might be but yeah, is it
super noticeable or is
it still pretty quick and
I I think it's noticeable because I'm
maybe a bit more sensitive to that
Basically like understanding what's going
on under the hood helps here so
for every request that you expect your
Laravel application to kind of
handle and respond to
We've got to boot PHP up
completely from scratch
I mean, it's not even like on a web
server where you might have
op cache, you know or
Processes like in PHP FPM in engine X I
don't get to tell you but you know, you
have processes that are just there
They're ready. They're
waiting to serve requests
And so when a request comes into the web
server it goes which one of you is free
Do this thing and because it's already
there and waiting it's kind
of super fast in this world
We can't spin up processes and have them
just waiting around for
the user to do some stuff
So we literally have to spin PHP up right
from the beginning on every single
request at the moment
Which you know, like there is just
overhead to doing that every time
There's some things that
we can do to speed that up
I do think we can get up cache going at
some point and I think I already started
exploring some of the
Putting pH 3 PHP in a thread on the
device, which you know swift and and this
they can all support
multi-threaded
applications so in theory at least it
could be possible to have like the PHP
Process just kind of it's not processed
but the the engine just like primed and
ready, you know, like
kind of ticking over
Waiting for the next request and then and
then it will be a lot lot faster
but I will say like right now it's not
It's not too slow. It's not like you tap
the button and then you're like
You know waiting for something to happen
It does react quite quickly
But it is a bit I will say it's a bit
slower than you know
If you've got native UI and you've got
it's just running native code directly
because well you've
got all this extra stuff
that's happening so
yeah, it probably adds like a
150 to 300 milliseconds to the whole
thing which you know on occasions it can
feel a little bit slow
Gotcha, yeah, it sort of reminds me of
you remember the old day. Well, you're
probably not old enough
to know the old days but
So the old days with you know, we were we
would build web apps and it was like
Oh, you've got a you've
got to compress all this down
You know the extra 10 kilobytes is gonna
dial up, you know, you
would check you would have to
You know toggle the the thing in your
browser to simulate
dial up and all that stuff
It's like, you know now it's like if you
know if my if even on my cell like only
just being on the browser
It's like it's still quick. It's crazy
how much faster everything it's just
gotten over the years. So that's
So, you know hundred to three hundred
milliseconds probably is not that bad
For now, I should be building
People who are used to building stuff on
I you know, like on an iPhone that iPhone
app developers will go
Oh, man, this is slow, you know because
they're so used to be
it being instantaneous
Especially when you're not making network
requests, you know, we're not going out
to the network. So it
should be really fast
but my kind of counter to it is this is
very early stage and
We'll get there
I think it's never going to be as fast as
truly native because it just can't be
there's too many layers of stuff going on
In between but I think we
can we can squeeze it down
So that it's almost as good as and I
think it's good enough right now
And I think that's fine for
a lot of use cases, you know
I think there's a lot of a lot of
businesses a lot of agencies
that will find that very very
acceptable, you know, so
Hopefully anyway
Yeah, that makes sense.
That's perfect sense. Um, so
Any features or anything that I did not
ask you about that you want to make sure
we get covered on this
Yeah, I mean I guess one of
the things that I have been
thinking about and I was talking about
with somebody yesterday even is
The whole ecosystem of of building stuff
Like mobile apps along with a server
based application, you know
And this kind of you're building all of
these tools and you fit them all together
and they're all in different things
You know, you might have
react native mobile apps
So you can do it cross-platform on iPhone
and Android and then maybe on the server
You've got Laravel and
maybe some other bits and pieces
But generally, you know, you're
communicating with like a Laravel API and
I just I've always felt
I've done that for years
And I've always felt it's a little bit
disjointed because not only
if you're gonna have these
teams of different people
with different skills and
you've got to come up with these
mechanisms for these systems to
communicate with each other and you've
got to document all of that stuff and
You you've got people doing diagrams and
writing docs and it's going out of date
and you know, all of the things I
Think having Laravel on
both sides of the equation
Really has the potential to unlock
something incredible that I don't I don't
see many people talking about
maybe I'm being ignorant but
Where you you just forget about the API
all together and these things just click
together and they just work
So you can just go I install this package
over here in my iPhone app
And I install kind of the counter version
of that for the server on the server app
And now they can just talk to each other
like securely like best practice safe and
everything and syncing data
You know between the two and you're just
using eloquent on both sides
And you're just like you don't even care
like is it talking to the API or is it
talking to the local database?
I don't know. It doesn't matter because
it just works, you know
It's like I've never had it that easy and
I think that I meant
like this far away from
Doing something like that and I just that
feels to me like a killer
opportunity to tap into for people
So like I see this is like
a Foundational technology, you know getting
these pieces to work
But then the real stuff is when you can
go these all things fit together. So
that's gonna be really cool
Yeah, that's gonna be it's it's gonna be
powerful. I you know the
Feedback I've seen just on the native PHP
original is
Super positive and everybody seems to
like like it outside of a couple
of
Community places that I'd rarely visit
But all the feedback
I've heard it really good
Tons of potential I
Like that when you said native PHP
original it made me think of Pringles
This is the you got desktop was like the
red tube of Pringles
What should the what
should the mobile one be?
Sour cream and onion because it's got you
got the green in the
That's good, I like I was thinking maybe
like the what's the spicy one or paprika
or something, you know
We might not have those here in America
or I've not seen those it's I've seen
it's the basic version of Pringles
It's like playing barbecue
sour cream and salt vinegar. No
You're missing out to get you need to get
into European shores
and try a paprika Pringles
You know, it's this is Tony I'm the
subject but Paul that
You know does a lot of
writing on the liberal news
He's he's one of these chip connoisseurs
and he just tries to
find the wildest chips
He can find it eats them and I'm like,
it's like ketchup and you
know pickle ketchup. I'm like
None of that
In the UK there was like one of the
common flavors, you know
I mean you get them bolty pack flavor of
crisps, you know, and it's got salt and
vinegar and it's got the salt it you know
and just
Cheese and onion and then the one was
always in there was prawn cocktail
What nobody loves this it stinks
That just sounds like the name itself
just sounds terrible. It's
like I would never want this
That's hilarious. Oh
I got a meatball chip. Yes, so that's
great. Yep. Kind of sore official. Yes
Y'all get y'all can start mailing it back
and forth, you know
different flavors of nasty chips
All right, yeah pin pals
All right, let's get back on topic
We'll go down we'll go
down a spiral here in a minute
but uh, so
I guess as far as the release goes
When are you thinking you another couple
months or you're thinking
fairly soon on your release date?
Don't like the official thing or or
what's your feeling right now?
um, I mean there is a lot
that I want to build in but
that's kind of like it'll come and it
will keep refining and there'll always be
more because there's there's a
Huge API footprint that we've got to kind
of tackle to build all the stuff
So I think it's just about getting a few
of those key ones, you know
It'd be great if we can get push
notifications in our purchases
The camera and a few other bits and
pieces going and then I mean Android is
that the other big piece, right?
So we get Android and those things and
get everything kind of on par with each
other and then it kind of feels ready
Yeah, because right
now it it's stable enough
you know, I there is an
app on the App Store that
so the the principle of that is you could
go today and and use it and build a
product that you can sell like you could
Sell it on the store or you could build
it for a client that's
paying you and you you know
You're basically making money off this
thing straight away, which is great
So I feel that it's like stable enough
right now to do something
But yeah, it's not gonna do all of the
things that you might want to do with
like interacting with the device
API's so I
Think once we've got some of those the
stability is kind of already there
Android will come and that'll just be
like the okay, you know
We've got the little cherry on top now
with everything working together. So
let's just roll this out proper and then
Then we can continue just like supporting
it and maintaining it and improving it
so I think
We're probably looking at
a couple of months from now
But I definitely want to bring that in as
much as I possibly can so get it get it
going as quickly as possible
basically
Awesome. Well if so when
people want to find out more
Where should they go? You know, I guess
like a newsletter sign up or
anything like that for them
Yeah, the the easiest place to go to is
native PHP comm slash iOS
Because it is iOS at only at the moment
But yeah, the the docs are coming
together on native PHP comm got now like
the whole section of
like switching between
desktop and mobile
Documentation so you can start to see all
of that come together
And if you go to that page that I just
mentioned, there's the chance to join the
early access program
And there's a sign-up link
there as well for a newsletter
If you know you're not ready to join the
early access program
so you can find out more
I'll be sharing updates and stuff on the
newsletter over the
coming weeks like probably
once a week for the next few weeks
Awesome. Well, man. Well, I appreciate
you taking the time to you know, let us
talk about native PHP iOS
And I'm really glad to have the
opportunity again. Yeah, I'm excited
I'm excited to see where this this you
know brings the community in the future
like we're it feels like
there Connie you with all the
announcements around
Laravel proper announcements then you
have you know what you're doing yet
fusion you have and
all this stuff is just
Coming out of nowhere in the last year
and it's it's pretty inspiring and I
think we'll do a lot with people with
Laravel in the future
Yeah, I can't wait to use fusion. I think
Aaron said he's gonna
bring it out on Friday
I think he was gonna do it on Monday
originally, but now it's
gonna be this this Friday
and I just I want to
get my hands on that and
chuck it into native PHP and
see if it work on mobile out of the box
because I think that's gonna be really
cool because I think view
You know, I've been showing most of my
demos from like live wire because I
really like using live wire
but I used to do a lot of view and I know
there's like a space for
still doing that and I think
allowing people to use
whatever front-end tooling
Really makes sense and and there's
nothing to stop you like I
can't tell you you can't do it
So, you know
you can use view or react to whatever and
and I think fusion will just slot right
in there and just work and I just
want to try it out so that I can see if
that happens and I think that's gonna be
very cool for a lot of people because
Yeah, Aaron did an awesome job. His talk
was brilliant and the the
project looks great, too
So I'm really excited to see that
For sure for sure
all right, well Simon, thank you again
for coming and joining me and
We'll look look forward to the launch and
to everything you're
working on. Thanks, man