I'm quite new to this, so please don't shoot this down too harshly. If I don't explain something clearly enough, please ask me.
Because Application variables are pretty much shared session variables, I wonder if perhaps the session code can be modified to handle these variables.
In userland, the implementation would be similar to sessions, and can work on two levels, for a single file or for a group of files.
Userland usage examples:
// cross file (i.e. an entire website)
application_vars_start('my_website'); // my_website is used as the SID
$_APPLICATION['website_users'] += 1;// single file application_vars_start(); // uses filename based SID, see below $_APPLICATION['page_users'] += 1;
I figured that by using the following in place of the user-input SID, you can easily have page-wide application vars, and by using the arg for application_var_start() in the the place of SG(request_info).path_translated you can have it across whatever you like, problem is when you have multiple sites on the same server, someone else might choose the same name
PHP_MD5_CTX context;
PHP_MD5Init(&context);
PHP_MD5Update(&context, SG(request_info).path_translated,
strlen(SG(request_info).path_translated));
PHP_MD5Final(key, &context);I don't know if this is clear enough, but in my head at least, it seems a inexpensive solution to something PHP is (in some peoples opinion) lacking. (Note: SRM seems like overkill just for this).
Another nice thing about this, as it'll be using the Session infrastructure it could use the session handlers aswell (sqlite, mm etc)
one problem that has been mentioned is multi-threaded situations, but I would assume that either the current session code doesn't suffer from this (and therefore neither will this) or that the session code will need to be fixed itself anyways.
It should be noted that $_APPLICATION will not be affected during run-time by other scripts changes, i.e. if a.php changes $_APPLICATION['foo'] whilst b.php is running, it doesn't see the changes till the next load... it might be nice to add a function to force a reload of data in the current file though?
I'm not sure if you'd consider this to be implemented into the core, but perhaps you could implement it into a PECL extension and then it can be considered for core after it has had some real-life testing/scenarios thrown at it?
Just to make it clear, I don't know C/C++ at all, this is just an idea that you might or might not like to implement, I cannot do it (I had help with the MD5 stuff ;).
- Davey
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