In a new post to his blog Jose de Silva takes a look at how using the Cache_Lite PEAR package can help to speed up your application by reducing overhead caused by data fetching.

Cache_Lite is one of the fast, light and reliable cache system for PHP. It’s an extremely easy and small learning curve system to work with. This post will try to make you a light introduction to PHP Cache_Lite.

He starts from the beginning - installing the package through the PEAR installer and setting up a basic configuration for a new Cache_Lite object in a script. Using this object you can test for the existence of a cached value or set a new one. The configuration allows you to define the "time to live" before the records expire.