I'm working on a PHP (Zend Framework) web application that, for each user request, makes multiple calls to external APIs (SOAP and/or REST over HTTP).
At the moment, the API calls are sequential:
- Call API A, wait around 1 second for results
- Call API B, wait around 1 second for results
- Send page back to the user
In this instance there is no dependency or relation between APIs A and B; I simply want to return the page with all the information as quickly as possible.
At the moment I'm thinking of either:
- curl_multi_exec() - http://php.net/manual/en/function.curl-multi-exec.php
- ZeroMQ - http://www.zeromq.org/
curl_multi_exec() would bind my client code for APIs A and B more tightly than I'd like.
ZeroMQ seems more complex to implement, and I'm not sure how I'd manage the worker processes and sockets.
Has anyone successfully implemented this behaviour in a PHP/Apache application without too much fuss?