Sunflower seedlings
After the start of your (PHP) application it will grow. You will include more and more files, execute more functions and handle more data. When you are finished processing, all memory will be released and your app will ‘die’. Summarized you could represent your application as something simple like a plant!
The first part of “it’s life” is germination, your application has to start and set up everything he needs. In more technical terms you can call this term the bootstrap. If you use a framework such as Zend Framework you’ve probably already heard from it. Using a .htacess file you direct all traffic to your bootstrap that then will startup the main application. For a person like I (who creates PHP CLI apps) the bootstrap is a way of setting important environment variables. So what should a bootstrap do? Continue reading →
