This question stems from watching Rasmus Lerdorf’s talk from Drupalcon. This question and his talk have nothing specifically to do with Drupal, by the way… it was just given at their con. My own question also has nothing specific to do with PHP. It is the single entry point in general that I am curious about.
These days it seems that most frameworks offer a single entry point for whatever you build with them. In his talk Rasmus mentions that he thinks this is bad. It seems to me that he would be correct in this thinking. If everyone hitting the site is coming in through the same entry point wouldn’t things bog down after traffic reached a certain point? Wouldn’t it be more efficient to allow people direct access to specific points in a site without having their request go through the same point? But perhaps the actual impact is not very bad? Maybe modern architecture can handle it? Maybe you have to be truly gigantic in scale before it becomes even worth considering? I’m curious as to what people on this site think about this issue.
In short, Rasmus or the interpretation is wrong.
This shows a clear lack of understanding how computers work. The more something gets used, the more likely it’s closer to the CPU, and therefore faster. Mind you, a single point of entry != single point of failure. But that’s all beside the point, when people say single point of entry, we’re talking about the app, it is a single point of entry for your logic.
Not to mention it’s architecturally brain-dead not to have a central point of entry, or reduce the number of entries points in general. As soon as you want to do one thing across your app at every entry point, guess how many places need to change? Having dealt with an app that each page stood on it’s own, it sucked having to change, and I assure you, we needed it.