Glossary

Definitions for the terms used throughout the Architecture section.

SuperNative#

The engine behind native rendering in NativePHP for Mobile v4. It spans everything described in this section: components, the render pipeline, the shared-memory boundary and the platform renderers. About the New Architecture is the best starting point.

EDGE (Element Definition and Generation Engine)#

The component language: the suite of native: Blade components — layout containers, typography, forms, navigation chrome, overlays — that screens are built from. EDGE templates compile down to Elements; the renderer only ever sees the resulting tree. See EDGE Components.

Native Component#

The PHP class that drives a screen — the Livewire-style component you register with Route::native(). It holds the screen's state, renders the Element Tree, and its methods are what event handlers like @press call.

Element#

A plain PHP object describing one piece of UI — a column, a text, a button — including its layout, style, props and handlers. Primitive elements are what appear in the Element Tree; higher-level EDGE components flatten into them during rendering.

Element Tree#

The tree of Elements produced by a Native Component's render() — the PHP-side description of the entire screen. The input to the Publish phase.

Element Runtime#

The native code compiled into the embedded PHP runtime (as part of the nativephp extension) that implements the PHP side of rendering: encoding Element Trees into frames, managing the shared memory region, and carrying wire events back to PHP.

Frame#

One published snapshot of the screen: the binary encoding of an Element Tree, written into shared memory as a sequence of nodes plus their props. Frames are versioned, skipped when identical to their predecessor, and shrunk by subtree reuse.

Node#

The fixed-layout binary record representing one Element inside a frame — its type, layout values, style values and references to its props and callbacks. Because every node has the same shape, the native readers can decode frames extremely quickly, and both platforms interpret every field identically.

Node Tree#

The native-side tree the readers decode from a frame and hand to the platform renderers. The previous Node Tree is what incoming frames are diffed against, and what reuse markers splice from.

Renderers#

The per-platform layer that maps each node type to real UI: SwiftUI views on iOS and composables on Android, each with a native flexbox implementation built on the platform's own Layout system. See Cross-Platform Implementation.

Runloop#

The long-lived cycle that drives a native screen on the PHP thread: render → publish → wait for an event → dispatch it → repeat. A screen's runloop lives for as long as the screen does.

Persistent Runtime#

The embedded PHP instance that boots your Laravel app once at launch and stays resident for the app's lifetime. Separate runtimes exist for queue workers and plugin background work. See Threading Model.

Callback ID#

The stable identifier assigned to an event handler (like @press="refresh") during rendering. Nodes reference handlers by ID, native events carry the ID back, and PHP resolves it to your method. Stable IDs are also what let unchanged subtrees be reused even though they contain handlers.

Wire Events#

The ordered event channel from native to PHP: presses, text changes, toggles, scrolls, system back, lifecycle signals and plugin events all travel through it as compact binary messages, waking the runloop exactly when there's something for your code to do.

SharedValue#

A value that lives on the native side and is updated on the UI thread — by gestures or animations — at the display's full frame rate. PHP holds a handle, binds it to animatable props in Blade, and receives discrete events when something meaningful happens. The mechanism behind PHP-free interaction, described in Render, Publish, and Mount.

Bridge Functions#

The second, simpler PHP↔native seam: a registry of named native functions (camera, biometrics, geolocation, and everything plugins add) that PHP calls with JSON parameters. Independent from the rendering path — see Cross-Platform Implementation and the plugin docs.

Embed SAPI#

The PHP build mode that produces PHP as an embeddable C library instead of a standalone binary, allowing the native app to run PHP inside its own process. The foundation of Embedded PHP.