CakePHP has a view cache (similar to Rails) that can be used to cache objects. The following snippet shows a CakePHP action that uses the serialize and unserialize functions to cache a tag cloud—an array containing tags in this case—to disk, and then read it back.

Note that we assign a TTL of 1 hours to the tag cloud, so if it’s more than one hour old it will be refreshed from the database.

   1  function index()
   2  	{
   3  		$maximum = 100;
   4  		$cache_key = "tag_cloud_$maximum";
   5  		$tag_cloud = cache($cache_key, null, '+1 hours');
   6  		
   7  		if(empty($tag_cloud))
   8  		{
   9  			$tag_cloud = Tag::generate_cloud($maximum);
  10  			cache($cache_key, serialize($tag_cloud));
  11  		}
  12  		else
  13  		{
  14  			$tag_cloud = unserialize($tag_cloud);
  15  		}
  16  		
  17  		return $tag_cloud;
  18  	}

The cache function is defined in $APP_ROOT/cake/basics.php, which is where you should look if you want to know more about how the caching works…

A very sophisticated algorithm that will display the length of, for example, a video as 12:01:30.

   1  function duration($seconds_count)
   2  	{
   3  		$delimiter  = ':';
   4  		$seconds = $seconds_count % 60;
   5  		$minutes = floor($seconds_count/60);
   6  		$hours   = floor($seconds_count/3600);
   7  
   8  		$seconds = str_pad($seconds, 2, "0", STR_PAD_LEFT);
   9  		$minutes = str_pad($minutes, 2, "0", STR_PAD_LEFT).$delimiter;
  10  
  11  		if($hours > 0)
  12  		{
  13  			$hours = str_pad($hours, 2, "0", STR_PAD_LEFT).$delimiter;
  14  		}
  15  		else
  16  		{
  17  			$hours = '';
  18  		}
  19  
  20  		return "$hours$minutes$seconds";
  21  	}

This is an example of how to upload a file from PHP to another server that may or may not be running PHP .

Note that using Pear’s HTTP _Request package is probably easier.

   1  <?php
   2    require_once('Var_Dump.php');
   3    Var_Dump::displayInit(array('display_mode' => 'HTML4_Text'), array('mode' => 'normal','offset' => 4));
   4  
   5    $url = 'www.aktagon.com/upload';
   6    $file = '/tmp/file_to_upload';
   7    $post_data = array();
   8  
   9    $post_data['username'] = '';
  10    $post_data['password'] = '';
  11    $post_data['file'] = "@$file";
  12  
  13    $ch = curl_init();
  14  
  15    curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_URL, $url);
  16    curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_HTTPHEADER, array(
  17  #    'Cookie: xxxx',
  18  #    'Content-Type: xxxx'
  19    ));
  20    curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, TRUE);
  21    curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_POST, true);
  22    #curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_PROXY, '127.0.0.1:8888');
  23  
  24    curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_POSTFIELDS, $post_data);
  25  
  26    $response  = curl_exec($ch);
  27    $info      = curl_getinfo($ch); 
  28    $http_code = $info['http_code'];
  29    $speed     = round($info['speed_upload'] / 1024);
  30    $size      = round($info['size_upload'] / 1024);
  31  
  32    if($http_code != 200)
  33    {
  34      echo "Upload failed with HTTP code $http_code. Uploaded $size kilobytes with $speed kilobytes/s.<br/>";
  35      echo "<h1>Response</h1><pre>$response</pre><h1>Debug information</h1>";
  36  
  37      Var_Dump::display($info);
  38    }
  39    else
  40    {
  41      echo "Uploaded successful. Uploaded $size kilobytes with $speed kilobytes / s.<br/>";
  42      echo "<h1>Response</h1><pre>$response</pre>";
  43    }
  44    curl_close($ch);
  45  ?>
  46  

You can remove the Var_Dump code (Pear module), if you haven’t installed it, or don’t need it.

   1  <ul>
   2   <?php
   3     foreach($_SERVER as $h=>$v)
   4       if(ereg('HTTP_(.+)',$h,$hp))
   5         echo "<li>$h = $v</li>\n";
   6     header('Content-type: text/html');
   7    ?>
   8  </ul>

Note that Pear’s Logging package is a lot more flexible, so I recommend you use that instead of CakePHP’s built-in logging.

Use this code to add a debug message to the CakePHP debug log:

   1  $this->log("Upload action accessed", LOG_DEBUG);

Note that using something other than LOG _DEBUG will log the message as an error.

Run the code once and you should be able to see the message in $CAKE_APP/tmp/logs/debug.log.