Both this post on the Zend Developer Zone and tis post on the International PHP Magazine's website point to a new article over on the IBM developerWorks website by Jack Herrington, Batch processing with PHP.
What do you do when you have a feature in your Web application that takes longer than a second or two to finish? You need some type of offline processing solution. Check out several methods for offline servicing of long-running jobs in your PHP application.
He talks about cron and its role in offline processing (including a basic primer on its format) before getting into the example itself. He looks at three examples:
- building an email queue
- building a generic queue system
- dumping out the database
