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…