The idea behind the new extension is to leverage the functionality contained libmemcached - a solution which has been widely adopted across many scripting communities and beyond. The extension is available in PECL and has lots of shiny new functionality. This article looks at how to obtain and work with the new extension, and also shows off a couple of the new features it includes.

Lorna talks a bit about the features of the extension in general but mentions two great new ones specifically - the "getmulti" fetch method allows for grabbing multiple chunks of cached information and the cas (compare and swap) function that works the same as a replace but checks the current contents first.