Types of Persistence

Welcome back. 0:04 Did you enjoy working with databases? 0:05 Welcome back. 0:08 I am glad you decided to keep working hard. 0:08 I know that last course took longer than usual to get through. 0:11 Hello and welcome, I am Elena, a PHP programmer for 0:15 over 15 years, and a teacher here at Tree House. 0:19 I'll be your guide through this journey into PHP. 0:22 I'm glad you've chosen to allow tree house to help you reach your goals. 0:25 Doesn't it make you feel special when contents speak directly to you? 0:29 And it makes it so much easier to find things on our phones and 0:33 computers seem to know what we are looking for, even before we ask. 0:36 Which is to expect our phones to know our locations, when we are looking for 0:41 a local service or trying to get directions. 0:44 Websites like Amazon make suggestions of things we may like to see, and 0:47 tell us when our favorite authors are releasing their latest books. 0:51 If you plan a trip using Expedia, the website keeps track of recent searches for 0:55 you in a scratch pad. 1:00 This makes it easy to jump back to view different choices for the trip. 1:02 This scratch pad is available without requiring users to be logged in. 1:06 Most of the time, we don't even realize how much our devices or 1:11 websites are set up to assist us until we try to use a different device or 1:14 a new phone and all of a sudden, our history and settings aren't there anymore. 1:19 And it's so much harder to do or find anything. 1:23 Users have come to expect so much and it's just getting worse. 1:27 So, what does that mean to you as a programmer? 1:31 How can you make your own applications user aware? 1:33 It starts with data persistence. 1:37 The idea of storing information for a prolonged period of time. 1:40 HTTP, the protocol for exchanging data on the internet, is a stateless protocol. 1:45 This means, 1:50 that web servers don't normally keep track of who's visiting each page on a site. 1:51 Servers also don't keep track of visitors as they click from page to page. 1:57 For example, say I visited a sites welcome page, and then I visited the contact page. 2:01 The server doesn't keep track of that progress and 2:07 doesn't know that I was just on the welcome page. 2:10 There are a number of different options for working with persistent data. 2:13 If you've worked with a database or 2:17 any file-based data storage, you've already worked with persistent data. 2:19 Multiple pages can access and know about this same information. 2:23 This form of persistance works well when we want data to be stored long term or 2:28 be utilized by multiple users. 2:33 We can also make use of a users browser to keep track of specific information and 2:36 tailor the users experience. 2:41 In this course, we'll put together a story building game 2:44 that will utilize different types of browser-based persistence. 2:47 The games steps the user through multiple pages that ask the user for 2:51 specific types of words. 2:55 Those words will be used in predefined locations of the string to create an often 3:06 comical or nonsensical story. 3:11 At the end, a user will be able to save a story to re-read later. 3:14 A user can also play the game again as many times as they'd like. 3:22