APC, or Alternative PHP Cache, not only allows for faster pages through opcode caching, but also since v3.0.0, allows for users to store any kind of data in memory for access between and across all requests. See my example below for a better idea on how to use it.

/* The first argument is the unique key which
 you will use to store some data later.
For globally cached data, the URL could make a good key,
and you could append the user id for user specific data.
The second argument is set to true or false depending
on whether APC finds data at the location,
if we don't find it, we know we need
to (re)generate it. */

$html = apc_fetch("unique_key_url", $success);
if(!$success)
{
	$html = big_and_slow_function();

	/*here the first argument is the key again,
	followed by the data to store and
	finally the time to live period in seconds */

	apc_add("unique_key_url", $html, 180);
}
echo $html;

Using a mechanism like this, you can see massive decreases in page load times. The friend I mentioned earlier brought his front page load time down from a number of seconds to low milliseconds.

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<?php
$obj = (object) array("foo" => "bar")
echo $obj->foo; // outputs "bar"
?>


One place you might get caught out here is trying to directly access numerically indexed values on the object, this breaks PHP’s naming convention and does not work correctly even with escaping.

<?php
$obj = (object) array("foo"=>"bar","foobar");
echo $obj->foo; //outputs "bar"
echo $obj->{0}; //$x->0 would cause a syntax error, this simply causes a notice for being unable to find the variable.


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<?php
if (!isset($_SERVER['PHP_AUTH_USER'])) {
    header('WWW-Authenticate: Basic realm="My Realm"');
    header('HTTP/1.0 401 Unauthorized');
    echo 'Text to send if user hits Cancel button';
    exit;
} else {
    echo "<p>Hello {$_SERVER['PHP_AUTH_USER']}.</p>";
    echo "<p>You entered {$_SERVER['PHP_AUTH_PW']} as your password.</p>";
}
?>

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Update: I’ve ported the Three API to Perl and added it to the three releases directory

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1. Three Web Text Widget

Enter Amazon S3. You pay for as little as you need and it expands as you do. The S3 docs point to undesigned’s PHP5 library using cURL. Perfect. 15 minutes and about 10 lines of code later we were archiving and backing up user content to S3.

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There’s a couple of steps to follow to get the above code working as Apache runs on port 80, which requires root priviliges to access. These steps are for Redhat/Centos (tested on Centos 5), but can easily be modified for any distro. You should avoid restarting if at all possible. If you absolutely have to, just replace “reload” with “restart” in the instructions below.

• Edit your sudoers file and add the following line ( If you are using suPHP/suexec you’ll need to change apache below to your web user ):
  apache ALL= NOPASSWD: /etc/init.d/httpd reload
• Comment out the following line in your sudoers file
  Defaults requiretty
• Add the web user to /etc/at.allow to give it access to ‘at’.

That’s it, you should now be able to reload Apache from within PHP using the code segment provided.

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With the original I had to hack together some json support but it seems this is the default behaviour of the latest release. I love this guy’s work and you should check out the other projects he has, all of which are built on the fantastic mootools. I particularly like Roar notifications which is inspired by Growl, the notification system for Mac OS X.

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1. Neowindex 2008

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