Exciting new for last week. I was working on some unit tests for my new ClubLaunchpad.com site. I was doing some work to determine conflict groups when members want to sign up to conflicting clubs, and each club and each member has requirements and preferences in terms of what they want. As part of this I did some work with the Collection class that laravel uses. It’s a fancy array() in many ways, and is how you would expect a result from a database call to come back.

I’ve been coding with PHP for a long, long time and over that time lots and lots of that work has been leveraging form buildings and table builders to make powerful and useful (though often dull looking) forms. There’s so many different relations that you can need to represent on a form, and so many different validation rules that you need to capture. And then there’s the mix between frontend permissions, backend permission, and javascript and all the rest of it.

This post is about trying to limit SQL queries, by the use of a method called “caching”. I’m going to talk about different methods ways of thinking about caching.