> Can you elaborate on this? I use sessions very often and find them to be very > useful. After all, they are there to be used, so why not use them when appli cable?
They do have applications, but most people find way too many applications. 1) Sessions often break a lot of things, typically bookmarks, the back button, using mutiple windows, and they expire. These are especially problems for beginners. 2) Sessions are not a good substitute for a performance cache, and people tend to use them that way. 3) Sessions make for very hard to find bugs. Think about how ridiculous it is to save an object to a session. Let's assume the object has 20 methods and 4 data points. Serializing an object and saving one copy for each user is a terrible programming habit to get into. What does it even mean to serialize an object? I find the concept nonsensical. Structs (arrays) can be serialized, objects should not be. What happens when you unserialize a database resource? or a Singleton? or anthing that references something else? The right solution is to boil down the required information to as little as possible, and then include it with the request. And then you can just do something like $myobj->restore($v1,$v2,$v3,$v4) If you want a short cut, then save the 4 data points in a session, but know your form won't work in mutiple windows at the same time. Regards, John Campbell _______________________________________________ New York PHP Community Talk Mailing List http://lists.nyphp.org/mailman/listinfo/talk NYPHPCon 2006 Presentations Online http://www.nyphpcon.com Show Your Participation in New York PHP http://www.nyphp.org/show_participation.php
