How to persist objects between requests in PHP

Question

I\'ve been using rails, merb, django and asp.net mvc applications in the past. What they have common (that is relevant to the question) is that they have code that sets up t

Answer 1

PHP (and ruby for that matter) are interpretive languages. That is they parse the files each time they are requested and I suppose you could say are converted to a pseudo byte code. It is more 'apparent' one could say that PHP is more like this than say RoR but they both behave the same way.

The feature of persisting data between requests is a feature of the server not of the language itself. For example, the RoR routing you speak of is in fact cached but that's cached in the server's local memory. It isn't compiled and stored for faster readins. The server (and by server I mean both the box & the web service instances) restarts this information is gone. The 'setting up the framework' you speak of still involves parsing EACH file involved in the framework. Rails parses each file during the request again and again, the production level features may in fact cache this data in memory but certainly in development it does not. The only reason I mention that is because it illustrates that it's a feature of the server not the language.

To achieve the same thing in PHP you could use Zend Server. As far as I know this is the only PHP interpreter that will 'compile' and use byte code when told to. Otherwise you'll need to find a way to store the data you want to persist over requests. APC as you mentioned is a very powerful feature, a more distributed one is Memcached and then of course there's more persistent forms like disc & sql.

I am interested in knowing why you'd like this particular feature. Are you noticing performance issues that would be 'solved' by doing this?