I'm building an web app. Its need to be highly portable, very self contained, and no non-standard dependencies. I need "install is just copy the single file." Given a random Internet (not intranet) web server I have the highly likelihood of having a PHP interpreter.

So I picked PHP.

But my God ASP.NET has me spoiled! I would kill for an $_APPLICATON right now. I have an app where I need to persist data across page views and share it with all users. Sessions aren't going to work. I thought about forced Session Fixation so all visitors are using the same session and so in effect I have a shared global persistent data store. Nope. Not gonna work.

Share memory? Out, not supported on IIS+PHP. Using a database? Out, not part of a standard PHP install on some Linux installations and no IIS installations.

I'm down to using a temp file and serializing a hash table.

GRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRR!