Vargo wrote in today to tell us about a new forum thread going on over at SitePoint concerning the creation of at servlet engine for PHP applications.

There is a nice discussion going on about the pros and cons of a (J2EE like) servlet engine at the php advanced programming forum at sitepoint: Has anyone heard of any project designing such a thing (a la J2EE servlet engine)?

And by "servlet engine", I mean a daemon that runs at least one PHP application and accepts requests to it. That is, a daemon would run (using some simple, standardized API) and load one or more PHP applications. Then, when the web server got a request for that servlet, it would pass it along to the servlet engine, which would then run the PHP application (only interpreting it once but executing many times), and, instead of forking more applications, it would (since we have good threading in the 2.6 kernel of Linux at least) create a new thread of the application for additional requests, sharing all application- and session-level data.

The discussion continues on from there with quite a few comments (multiple pages and all) both pro and con for the creation of such an application...