In recent years, more and more PHP developers are interested in asynchronous frameworks, like Swoole. However, Swoole brings to PHP not just asynchronous programming; there are a few mind-blowing features in Swoole that many developers are not yet aware of. In this article, I will discuss how to use Swoole to build an application server to serve web requests, to handle cron jobs, and to process job queues without relying on any third-party applications or software.