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

The following are functionally the same:

<?php
$arr = array("one", "two", "three");
reset($arr);
while (list($key, $value) = each($arr)) {
    echo "Key: $key; Value: $value
\n";
}
foreach ($arr as $key => $value) {
    echo "Key: $key; Value: $value
\n";
}
?>


Ever want to drive straight into a foreach without checking that the array has elements?

<?php
$non_array = null;
foreach ((array) $non_array as $key => $value) {
    echo "Key: $key; Value: $value
\n";
}
?>


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1. PHP and stdClass

These features are my favourite benefits of using Kohana over Codeigniter:

1. Seperation of system files and static content by default. No extra work is needed to seperate your application files from the framework system files
2. Static classes for helpers instead of functions, allowing logical grouping of utility functions.
3. Does not break $_GET variables. I don’t care what the CI proponents say, breaking $_GET is unacceptable.
4. The session driver can optionally use native sessions. An application on it’s own secure enviroment doesn’t need to worry about native session security like you do on shared servers.
5. Supports only PHP5+; PHP4 is dead, and PHP6 is not too far off, it’s time to cast off the dead weight.

There’s plenty more things I like better in Kohana, but the 5 above will have to do for now.

Codeigniter does have one advantage, better documentation, but as Kohana matures so should its documentation.

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1. localhostr update

If you’ve visited this site on an older browser (extremely few do), you would aready have received a notification for this ;)

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Update: This guy is a machine, he’s now at 2,800 icons in this amazing pack

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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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