Echoes from ZendCon Europe 2013

ZendCon is probably the biggest and most important conference in the PHP world. And for the first time it took place in Europe - Paris (18-20 November). Many brilliant and famous engineers, developers, speakers, entrepreneurs had their presentation there. Also some of the most important people  from Zend (“the PHP company”) were there to present new (and not so new) ideas, tools, best practices and to answer questions either from the stage in front of the audience or by the coffee stand
 in private.

My impression of the conference as a whole is that the API-centric and mobile-first principles will have growing importance in the future. That seems to be the main direction Zend is wishing to follow. At the same time automated continuous deployment is considered to be of great value in the software engineering process. And let’s not forget the “clouds”. They have been around for some time, but more and better integrated tools are being introduced either by the big players such as Google, Microsoft, IBM or by smaller but specialized vendors.

Cache patterns in PHP

No matter how skilled developer you are, sometimes you can't avoid having slow pieces of code - handling remote connections, database queries or just complicated calculations. One of the possible solutions is to implement caching. But the question is - how to do it right? In the following text I'll got through several possible ways how to implement caching in search of the best solution. I'll use the cache storage implementation from Zend Framework 2, but any other relevant implementation can be used instead.