Question

I’m just playing around with some PHP and was wondering what happens when an object from a class is created within another PHP script?

I assume once its created and been processed their is no way of then going back and ‘playing’ around with it from another script?

The idea is i’m trying to create a kind of deck of cards using a card class, each card has specific data that is added to each individual object to make it unique, suit, value etc. Once its created i need to be able to go back to specific cards to use them. In java i’d have an arraylist of card objects, i’m not sure how to approach the same area in PHP.

Thanks.

Answer 1

There is no problem passing objects around inside a php script, your problem is that php is that the webserver calling the script is essentially “stateless”. i.e. every time someone posts the url from a browser a complete fresh copy of the php program is fired up.

To save data between times there are several options:-
One is to use $_SESSION variables which are associated with a user session but $_SESSION itself is an array so it gets really clumsy holding complex structures here, also , it sounds like you want to share the deck between users.

You could serialise your object and store it in a file — which is OK as long as its not updated very often — but if its updated by every user they will start overwriting each others changes.

Much better is to store the deck in a database (SQLITE is usually built into php) so that several users can share and update in a controlled manner.

Another good option would be to use one of the popular data caches such as “memcached” which will cache the data between calls to the script.