Customer sessions stores data related to customer, checkout session stores data related to quote and order. They are actuall under one session in an array. So firstname in customer/session will be $_SESSION[‘customer’][‘firstname’] and cart items count in checkout/session will be $_SESSION[‘checkout’][‘items_count’]. The reason Magento uses session types separately is because once the order gets placed, the checkout session data information should get flushed which can be easily done by just unsetting $_SESSION[‘checkout’] session variable. So that the session is not cleared, just session data containing checkout information is cleared and rest all the session types are still intact.
Daily Archives: June 19, 2015
Magic Methods
The “magic” methods are ones with special names, starting with two underscores, which denote methods which will be triggered in response to particular PHP events. That might sound slightly automagical but actually it’s pretty straightforward, we already saw an example of this in the last post, where we used a constructor – so we’ll use this as our first example.
PHP functions that start with a double underscore – a “__” – are called magic functions (and/or methods) in PHP. They are functions that are always defined inside classes, and are not stand-alone (outside of classes) functions. The magic functions available in PHP are: __construct(), __destruct(), __call(), __callStatic(), __get(), __set(), __isset(), __unset(), __sleep(), __wakeup(), __toString(), __invoke(), __set_state(), __clone(), and __autoload().
- Initializing or uninitializing object data
- Processing access to undefined methods or properties
- Converting objects to string representation
KeepAlive
HTTP is a session less protocol. A connection is made to transfer a single file and closed once the transfer is complete. This keeps things simple but it’s not very efficient.
To improve efficiency something called KeepAlive was introduced. With KeepAlive the web browser and the web server agree to reuse the same connection to transfer multiple files.