Re: [Proposal] Idea for Application level variables

The storage, just like $_SESSION can be any of the pre-defined settings (mm, files or SQLite (php5)) or "user" and can then be stored in a database or whatever system the user wants. (This would indeed mean that an application_set_save_handler() will also need to be there) I think that the $_APPLICATION variables should have exactly the same life expectancy and garbage collection as $_SESSION variables currently do, though they should be set independantly. Just as with $_SESSION you can have more control by using your own "user" method to store the data. - Davey Jeremy S. Johnstone wrote:

I noticed something which you said, and forgive me if this part may be obvious, but you mentioned across instances of applications? Do you mean something like a shared memory between all web connections to the server? One issue I could forsee if this is the case, what happens when there is no connections to the server for an extended period of time (extended being even as short as a few minutes)? Should PHP store this superglobal's value indefinitely, or perform some type of garbage collection? If PHP should clean up after itself, what criteria would you expect to be followed for deciding if something is no longer useful? I don't think you would want this criteria configurable in a ini setting for example, because hosting companies all do something different. If a developer were to use this feature, they would need a standardized timeframe that the values would last. This is just a couple things I think would need to be considered before implementing something like this. If I am way out in left field, I apologize. -Jeremy