Equivalent to JSP scope="application" in PHP

Hey, Been using JSP recently (yeah, I know) and have found one (1) good thing about it which is that if you create a "bean" with scope=application you can then store data (e.g. a cached content array) within the bean which all pages can access the same instance of. I can't think of the equivalent thing in PHP, can anyone else? Quite useful as a middle ground in terms of page weight between going to SQL for content each page and pre-caching it all as HTML. Nick.