Ok, the title is a bit of a stretch, but it’s a good one isn’t it?
What I really want to talk about is an example of why it’s a good idea to make wrappers for PHP extensions instead of just using them directly.
When Grooveshark started using memcached ever-so-long-ago, with the memcache pecl extension, we decided to create a GMemcache class which extends memcache. Our main reason for doing this was to add some convenience (like having the constructor register all the servers) and to add some features that the extension was missing (like key prefixes). We recently decided that it’s time to move from the stagnant memcache extension to the pecl memcached extension, which is based on libmemcached, which supports many nifty features we’ve been longing for, such as:
- Binary protocol
- Timeouts in milliseconds, not seconds
- getByKey
- CAS
- Efficient consistent hashing
- Buffered writes
- Asyncronous I/O
Normally such a transition would be a nightmare. Our codebase talks to memcached in a million different places. But since we’ve been using a wrapper from day 1, I was able to make a new version of GMemcache with the same interface as the old one, that extends memcached. It handles all the minor differences between how the two work, so all the thousands of other lines in the app that talk to memcached do not have to change. That made the conversion a <1 day project, when it probably would have otherwise been a month long project. It also has the advantage that if we decide for some reason to go back to using pecl memcache, we only have to revert one file.