Blazor Components in PHP (PeachPie)

This project is an experiment to implement Blazor support in PHP on Peachpie.

It can render interactive components (see Counter), with the caveat that I used reflection to expose internal functionality.

This will only work with .NET 8 RC1, since there are changes to the method signatures in RC 2.

Background

Rendering Razor View partials in PHP is already supported by Peachpie. This extends the support to the more modern Razor component model - and possibly hosting interactive components.

Peachpie is a PHP compiler and runtime for .NET. Enabling you to run your PHP code on .NET, and interop with code written for .NET/C#.

Scenario

Embedding interactive Razor components in PHP apps running on .NET - including Wordpress.NET

That way you will not need to use Razor Views as an intermediary for rendering the components.

Screenshots

PHP page

Counter component

Sample

In index.php:

<?php

echo Peachpie\AspNetCore\HttpContextExtension::Component<BlazorClassLib\RenderMessage>([
    "Message" => "Hello from the Render Message component!"
]);

Where RenderMessage is the Razor component.

Projects

This solution consists of the following projects:

• Server - The hosting web app
• Website - The PHP part of the app
• BlazorExtensions - The glue that makes Blazor in PHP possible - including the hack with reflection
• BlazorClassLib - Contains the Blazor components
• Client - The Blazor WebAssembly app from which we render components

Notes

Issues with interactive components

I have based this loosely on the BlazorMinimalApiTest project, it enables interactive components through Minimal API endpoints - both running on Server, and in WebAssembly.

However, PHP requires you to get the rendered - the right rendered that supports emitting code for the rendering modes.

The HtmlRenderer only emits static HTMl - and it doesn't support interactivity.

One possible solution would be if the .NET Team exposed the functionality of EndpointHtmlRenderer.

In the meantime, I have done a Reflection hack. This might break with future versions as the APIs are internal.

Components can be embedded

Although not demonstrated, you can embed interactive components (both Server and WebAssembly) within static server-side rendered components. This is part of .NET 8.

WebAssembly support

If everything works, you would simply add a Blazor WebAssembly standalone project, and reference it from the Server project. The set the appropriate render modes.

See Client project.

Issue with casting PHP parameters to the right CLR type

The component might take a parameter of type int but Peachpie is casting it to long.

Perhaps special logics is needed.

On the project structure and references

The reason for why put components in BlazorClassLib is so that the Website project can reference those component.

Status of Peachpie

The status of Peachpie is to me unknown.

The tooling that I used in VS Code was running on .NET 5 - and that is no longer supported.