[admin (no pm's please)]

The competition would be for the best code to serialise and deserialise an array made up of topic ids and times.

e.g. the array is created with:

$tracking_topic[$topic_id]= $topic_read_time;

the serialisation must be stored and retrieved as a cookie.

My entry will be installed on the forums shortly and has a combined 68 lines of code.

There are two judgement criteria:

1) How small is the cookie for 150 topics?
2) How fast is the code. Especially for decoding.


Anyone beating my efforts will get kudos and a prize.

[admin (no pm's please)]

Have just corrected a typo that might make it clearer.

As a php exercise I think this is a really good one. Whilst short it deals with a lot of deep questions.

[while()]

I'd love to join in but I'm pretty crap with anything complicated, my brain can't even handle OOP. Sounds like a fun idea though, reminds me of the netflix competition

[admin (no pm's please)]

I'm glad that programming seems to have moved on beyond the OOP mania there once was.

I love the object orientated approach, I wrote some darn useful stuff with OO techniques before languages bothered to support such measures. Some things are crying out to be treated as objects....

But then things went crazy, all of a sudden everything was meant to be an "object", people used to sit around scratching their heads on a project wondering how it divided into "objects" and immense screwups occurred because the model was wrong.

Take a forum as an example. The database layer makes perfect sense as an object. Some other bits like a session, a user, a template also fit the bill. Fair play to phpbb they have pretty much done those as objects. Once you go beyond that then you start struggling, try and treat topics and posts as objects and you probably get yourself in a mess as topics and posts are really intertwined.

[Zudane]

I probably could do this... but I'd need to learn PHP first.. I've only got a small hold on it.  And right now I don't really want to learn PHP.