Gonzalo Ayuso has an interesting new post today looking at how to go cross-technology in your application and store your PHP sessions in a basic Node.js instance.

We use sessions when we want to preserve certain data across subsequent accesses. PHP allows us to use different handlers when we're using sessions. The default one is filesystem, but we can change it with session.save_handler in the php.ini. session.save_handler defines the name of the handler which is used for storing and retrieving data associated with a session. We also can create our own handler to manage sessions. In this post we're going to create a custom handler to store sessions in a node.js service.

He includes the full code you'll need (also here on github) to make a custom session handling class on the PHP side and some simple unit tests done on the Node.js side to ensure for proper handling and garbage collection.