Works with node.js version: 179f718d62c17c674a941a2539b81fee54152da5

Node Ugly

Ugly is the worst foreign function interface ever created. Only use it in times of great despair.

What does it do?

Ugly allows you to run PHP from within node.js:

var
  sys = require('sys'),
  php = require('ugly').createClient();

php.invoke('sprintf', '%s %s', 'hello', 'world', function(e, r) {
  sys.p(r.val); // => 'hello world'
});

How does it work?

When creating a client, ugly spawns a PHP child process that is running a specific worker script. The worker script listens to messages via stdin. When you call the invoke() function, ugly dispatches it to the worker script and passes the evaluated return value to your callback.

How does it deal with objects / resources?

PHP Objects and resources are generally not easy to serialize. To avoid unexpected behavior, ugly creates a unique reference for each of those variables. Example:

php.invoke('mysql_connect', 'localhost', 'root', 'root', function(e, r) {
  php.invoke('mysql_get_server_info', r.reference, function(e, r) {
    sys.p(r.val); // => 5.0.77
  });
});

What is the purpose of this?

This hack is meant as a temporary solution to get access to libraries (such as MySql) that are not yet natively available for node.js.

Why PHP and not Ruby, Python, ...?

PHP has a few characteristics that make it very appealing choice for this ugly crime:

• PHP is available pretty much everywhere
• PHP has a huge standard library included by default
• PHP is one big pile of functions, no namespaces, not much object orientation
• PHP is reasonably fast
• PHP is very easy to learn & use

That being said, there is no reason you couldn't contribute workers for other languages. Check out lib/worker/php.php as a starting point if you feel like enslaving your favorite language.

What about performance?

Here are the results for stress testing print_r for 1 sec with 10 attempts:

print_r:
  samples: 10
  iterations per sample: 16.384
  mean: 10.575 iterations / sec
  median: 10.598 iterations / sec
  standard deviation: +/-39 iterations / sec
  coefficient of variation: 0.37%

Benchmarks are tricky, but the results indicate that while the overhead of this solution is high, the performance should be sufficient for things like database access.

(Test was run on a MacBook Pro: 2.66 Ghz Intel Core 2 Duo, 4GB 1067 MHz DDR3, OS 10.6.2)