Sergey Zhuk has kicked off a series of posts to his site showing how to create a ReactPHP memcache client that can work as a streaming client for your PHP application rather than single get/set requests.

Before writing any code we should think about our future client’s API: how we are going to use it [and] what methods it is going to have.

The client is going to be used in ReactPHP asynchronous ecosystem, so I’m going to provide a promise-based interface for it (when methods return promises). Also, we are building a streaming client. Under the hood, we will open a socket connection and use it as a stream. The client itself will be a wrapper on this binary stream communication. That means that it is our job to manually parse Memcached protocol to write and read data with sockets. So, having all of this in mind, let’s start.

He then starts in on the development of the base for the client including the factor class that will create the client (connector) with the provided Loop instance. He includes an example of this in use to create the client and point it to a local memcache server. Next he creates the client class that will use the stream to send requests and a parser to work with the responses and resolve actions that need to be taken based on their contents.