Cache is a programming concept that can be used in a various range of applications and for various purposes. A cache library can be used for storing database queries for later use, to store rendered pages to be served again without generating them again, or to save indexed pages in a crawler application to be processed by multiple modules.
A cache mechanism is more simple that it might sound. It’s just a simple module that should implement 2 actions:
- to store a value(identified by a key).
- to retrieve a value if it’s not expired.
- additionally it can offer a mechanism to invalidate a set of values or the entire cache.
In this tutorial we are going to create a disk cache script. It stores the string values in files, each value is stored in a file and it contains an additional file to store the expiration date. Performance wise, this is not the best approach, but the script is designed like that with a clear purpose: the additional file can be used to store additional attributes, beside the expiration date. Imagine an application that crawls pages, with different modules. Each time a module crawls the page, it adds it’s result to the additional file.
Continue reading