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

I think you're making some incorrect generalizations. All of those frameworks (ex: Rails) can be run with different configurations. Under some, a process is created for every request. This obviously hurts performance, but it shows that these frameworks don't rely on a long-running process. They can set things up (reparse config files, create objects, etc.) every request if needed.

Of course, mod_php (the way PHP is usually used) runs inside the web server process, unlike CGI. So I don't see anything fundamentally different between CakePHP (for example) and Rails.

I think perhaps you are looking for something like Python's WSGI or Ruby's Rack, but for PHP. This specifies an interface (independent of how the language is run) for an application. For a new request, a new instance of an application object is created. As far as I know, this does not exist for PHP.