*****APPLICATION LEVEL VARIABLES*****

[Anon]

Hello!!! I asked about this like 3 days ago....does NO ONE have an answer for me?:

Does PHP have the ability to or will it soon have the ability to utilize Application level variables? I didn't see anything about it in the users manual (at least what i thought might be about Application level vars.)

I need to convert an ASP application that absolutely needs to utilize Application level variables into a PHP version. (Flash chat type thing..).

I don't want to have to use JSP.

-j

[Anon]

im not sure exactly what youre trying to do...

php has global variables. you can include a file at the top of each page that sets the values.

you can also use sessions or cookies.

paul
http://xhawk.net

[jasonm]

An Application level variable is one that is stored on the server and is available to anyone accessing the web application in that specified virtual folder. So, if I went to www.somewhere.com and the Application variable "var1" was set to "joe", I would see "joe" when I calle dtha variable. If I decided to CHANGE that variable to "mary", when you came to the site, that variable, when called by you, would not equal "mary". If you changed it back to "joe", if I called it, it would say,"joe" again. it is kinda like a database entry, but w/o the database (it's much faster, but eats up server resources.)

ASP and JSP have that capability:

ASP: Application("var1")="joe"
JSP: application.setAttribute("var1","joe");

An application starts when the first user reuqests a page (ASP/JSP) from the application and ends when the web server shuts down or restarts.

Check out how to do chat with ASP or Flash/ASP...that might help you understand what I am talking about...

-j

[rrijnders]

Hi J

I have not heard whether the PHP developers plan to encorporate application level vars or not.

Personally, I create an application object that keeps all application vars in an associative array that I serialize and update in a dbms. If the object is accessed frequently (as it is in this case) the dbms (postgreSQL is my choice) will keep it cached, anyway. Since all the pages need to hit the db for other stuff, the time to create the connection is not extraneous to the norm and hence, also not an additional burden.

I tested this, rather unscientifically, with similar ASP and PHP apps using this method and application vars and found no difference in speed for even moderate numbers of hits. For infrequent hits the PHP was actually faster because asp under IIS swaps out memory after a time which gets reloaded when a request comes in (I admit, though, that I did not try to optimize IIS settings).

Just my $.02

-- Rich

[Anon]

Thanks a bunch! I will try some of that..I am not familiar with postgreSQL, would MySQL work as well?

-j

[rrijnders]

The technique should work fine with mySQL, I am just not sure of the caching capabilities of mySQL; so you will have to experiment to see how you get the best response times.

-- Rich