Welcome back.

Did you enjoy working with databases?

Welcome back.

I am glad you decided to keep working hard.

I know that last course took longer than usual to get through.

Hello and welcome, I am Elena, a PHP programmer for

over 15 years, and a teacher here at Tree House.

I'll be your guide through this journey into PHP.

I'm glad you've chosen to allow tree house to help you reach your goals.

Doesn't it make you feel special when contents speak directly to you?

And it makes it so much easier to find things on our phones and

computers seem to know what we are looking for, even before we ask.

Which is to expect our phones to know our locations, when we are looking for

a local service or trying to get directions.

Websites like Amazon make suggestions of things we may like to see, and

tell us when our favorite authors are releasing their latest books.

If you plan a trip using Expedia, the website keeps track of recent searches for

you in a scratch pad.

This makes it easy to jump back to view different choices for the trip.

This scratch pad is available without requiring users to be logged in.

Most of the time, we don't even realize how much our devices or

websites are set up to assist us until we try to use a different device or

a new phone and all of a sudden, our history and settings aren't there anymore.

And it's so much harder to do or find anything.

Users have come to expect so much and it's just getting worse.

So, what does that mean to you as a programmer?

How can you make your own applications user aware?

It starts with data persistence.

The idea of storing information for a prolonged period of time.

HTTP, the protocol for exchanging data on the internet, is a stateless protocol.

This means,

that web servers don't normally keep track of who's visiting each page on a site.

Servers also don't keep track of visitors as they click from page to page.

For example, say I visited a sites welcome page, and then I visited the contact page.

The server doesn't keep track of that progress and

doesn't know that I was just on the welcome page.

There are a number of different options for working with persistent data.

If you've worked with a database or

any file-based data storage, you've already worked with persistent data.

Multiple pages can access and know about this same information.

This form of persistance works well when we want data to be stored long term or

be utilized by multiple users.

We can also make use of a users browser to keep track of specific information and

tailor the users experience.

In this course, we'll put together a story building game

that will utilize different types of browser-based persistence.

The games steps the user through multiple pages that ask the user for

specific types of words.

Those words will be used in predefined locations of the string to create an often

comical or nonsensical story.

At the end, a user will be able to save a story to re-read later.

A user can also play the game again as many times as they'd like.