Yesterday, the first PHPUG Rheinhessen meeting of 2025 took place. The company Schwarzer hosted this time and invited us to the Gutenberg Digitalhub. For me personally, it was great to meet new people and have interesting conversations about current topics in PHP development. At the same time, it was a shame that some registered participants did not show up, even though the Schwarzer team had provided an excellent selection of food and drinks — a big thank-you for that!
Once again, there were two presentations.
Developing an AI agent with PHP/Laravel
The evening began with an insightful talk by Hans-Jürgen Schwarzer, the founder and managing director of Schwarzer.de. He shared his insights into developing an AI agent using PHP and Laravel. What was particularly remarkable was how a simple request from a friend turned into a productive idea for creating an AI assistant. This impressively demonstrates how creativity and technical expertise can come together to develop solutions that make people's everyday lives easier. A construction project monitor served as an example of an AI assistant.
Hans-Jürgen Schwarzer presented the software architecture that has proven itself in practice and explained how the AI agent can scale under load. Laravel, as a stable framework, came with built-in features that allow tasks to be executed asynchronously to avoid bottlenecks in the application. I also found the implementation of a dashboard, optimized through OLAP and data storage decoupled from the process engine, extremely interesting. This allows users to experience the best possible performance in the frontend. It was inspiring to hear that the usual solutions such as OpenAI do not always have to be used; instead, Hans-Jürgen mentioned that smaller, specialized AI models, which can also be self-hosted, contribute to the overall success of the application here. The application itself is built to support multiple tenants and is already being used for other solutions as well.
High-performance PHP: The right server for your project
Afterward, I had the opportunity to talk about alternative PHP runtimes. At valantic, I have spent time over the past two years (on and off) looking at various PHP server solutions — particularly FrankenPHP, Openswoole, and Roadrunner. These different runtimes offer exciting approaches to boosting the performance of PHP applications.
I wanted to make clear how important choosing the right server is for a project's performance. This variety of solutions opens up new possibilities, and I hope some of the participants were inspired to integrate new technologies into their projects. In our team, for example, we use Openswoole to accelerate the GraphQL interface in Adobe Commerce, which has led to significant improvements in response times.
I found it interesting that even exotic technologies such as PeachPie were quite well known. But other technologies such as nginx Unit were discussed too.
Here are the slides from my presentation (feel free to ask me for the audio track):
Networking and exchanging ideas — An important part
What I found particularly motivating that evening was the interaction and conversations between the participants. The discussions about AI applications and working with customers and projects made it clear that we were all on the same wavelength. It is always lovely to see how a meetup like this serves as a platform for exchanging ideas and experiences.
The conversations outside the presentations are especially important. This is where you broaden your horizons and can discover new viewpoints too.