How to create dynamic Html pages on the run ..

[Anon]

Let me explain the problem we are facin here.
We r using fast templates to generate html files. for rendering the site pages.
wht we want is basically, a code which wud take up the templates..( when the link to a pparticular page is accessed for the first time) generate the html..and write it to the file system , for caching purposes..- which wud be refreshed every half hour. to keep up upto-date info..on the site

[Anon]

I don't know anything about fasttemplates, but I was working on a caching tool earlier today.

• Rename whatever.php to oldwhatever.php
• Make a "cache" subdirectory that is writable by the web server.
• Install the following code as whatever.php

<?
// make a filename out of the args
$fname="cache/$argv[0]";
if (!file_exists($fname))
{
$dir = dirname($PHP_SELF);
$me = basename($PHP_SELF);
// get the file and cache it
$ba=file("http://$HTTP_HOST$dir/old$me?$argv[0]");
$buf=implode("",$ba);
$fp=fopen($fname,"w");
fputs($fp,$buf);
fclose($fp);
}
readfile($fname);
?>

This code compensates for the lack of freopen() in php by routing the request through the Web server. This lets us pull the results of a page into a variable rather than echoing them to stdout.

This code would be easy to modify to support a 30-minute timeout, or you could easily write a cache-flushing tool and run it as a cron process.

The cache directory name probably ought to be specific to the instance of this code.