Minimizing GET requests using PHP - php

Question

I wrote a function that uses YQL to pull stock info as follows:
function quote_func() {
$BASE_URL = "https://query.yahooapis.com/v1/public/yql";
// Form YQL query and build URI to YQL Web service
$yql_query = "select * from yahoo.finance.quotes where symbol in ('AAPL')";
$yql_query_url = $BASE_URL . "?q=" . urlencode($yql_query) . "&format=json&env=http://datatables.org/alltables.env&callback=";
// Make call with cURL
$session = curl_init($yql_query_url);
curl_setopt($session, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER,true);
$json = curl_exec($session);
// Convert JSON to PHP object
$phpObj = json_decode($json);
// Confirm that results were returned before parsing
if(!is_null($phpObj->query->results)){
$quote = $phpObj->query->results->quote;
return $quote;
}
}
I then display the information I want using:
<?php echo quote_func()->DATA-I-WANT; ?>
I know that this is bad because each time I use the function I'm executing a GET request.
Can someone point me in the right direction at least?

Answer 1

I'd suggest that you cache the result. You could store the data in a database but the best place is probably a proper cache like memcached, APC or even just the filesystem.
Here's a dead simple filesystem implementation (untested and just for illustration).
$cacheFile = '/tmp/myCache.txt';
$expirePeriod = 1800; // in seconds
if (file_exists($cacheFile) && time() - filemtime() < $expirePeriod) {
$quoteData = file_get_contents($cacheFile);
} else {
$quoteData = quote_func();
file_put_contents($cacheFile, $quoteData);
}