Caching JSON output in PHP

Question

Got a slight bit of an issue. Been playing with the facebook and twitter API\'s and getting the JSON output of status search queries no problem, however I\'ve read up furthe

Answer 1

It's a good idea to use caching to avoid the rate limit. Here's some example code that shows how I did it for Google+ data, in some php code I wrote recently.

private function getCache($key) {
    $cache_life = intval($this->instance['cache_life']); // minutes
    if ($cache_life <= 0) return null;

    // fully-qualified filename
    $fqfname = $this->getCacheFileName($key);

    if (file_exists($fqfname)) {
        if (filemtime($fqfname) > (time() - 60 * $cache_life)) {
            // The cache file is fresh.
            $fresh = file_get_contents($fqfname);
            $results = json_decode($fresh,true);
            return $results;
        }
        else {
            unlink($fqfname);
        }
    }

    return null;
}

private function putCache($key, $results) {
    $json = json_encode($results);
    $fqfname = $this->getCacheFileName($key);
    file_put_contents($fqfname, $json, LOCK_EX);
}

and to use it:

        // $cacheKey is a value that is unique to the
        // concatenation of all params. A string concatenation
        // might work. 
        $results = $this->getCache($cacheKey);
        if (!$results) {
            // cache miss; must call out
            $results = $this->getDataFromService(....);
            $this->putCache($cacheKey, $results);
        }