Re: PHP 6.0 Wishlist

Jani Taskinen wrote:

On Sat, 22 Oct 2005, Sebastian Bergmann wrote:

Rasmus Lerdorf schrieb:

Include an opcode cache by default. A lot of work has gone into pecl/apc recently, but I am not hung up on which one goes in.

In case we include APC by default, it would be nice if its apc_store() / apc_fetch() mechanism could be mapped to a new super-global, say $_PERSISTENT[].

    Containing what? 

A super-global like $_PERSISTENT could work like $_SESSION, with a similar "framework", but could store data which is NOT user-specific like session-data. So you have a very simple methode to store any variables/objects between HTTP-requests. If you use something like APC as backend, you will also get a fast methode to store/load variables/objects, which are not user-specific, and perhaps expensive to create/load (e.g. from a webservice, DB...). The problem with "several machines serving same web pages" is exactly the same you have with $_SESSION today. But the session extension provides means to work around this using a DB or memcached as backend. This could be copied by something like a "Persistance Framework". But many other PHP installations will have another problem you don't see with $_SESSION today: concurrency. That's because you don't have a unique session-ID anymore, so application1 can overwrite variables from application2, script1.php can overwrite variables from script1.php and on shared hosting setups user1 can overwrite variables from user2. That's also a security issue. So an application-ID has been a good idea, but if you have to define it by yourself, chances are that two users choose the same application-ID and applications will break. So perhaps you also have to find some other values, the users cannot control, to avoid concurrency issues. Perhaps make a $_PERSISTENT variable only available for the script which has created it (by saving the path too, but if you move/rename..., and not very flexible anymore). Best regards Andreas PS: I've read the discussion on this list before ;-)