jeroendesloovere / countries-php-api

This Countries PHP class gets all the countries in the world and their information using an API.

Hi there 👋

countries-php-api's Issues

Implementation of caching mechanism

Right now the class is working great but there are some issues. First of all, what happens if the geonames.org server is down? The cURL will fail to fetch the data, and that will cause unexpected behavior of the application that uses the class. Furthermore, it's not very efficient to make an API call to an external web server every single time a user just accesses a page with a country drop-down list.

I was thinking of creating a simple caching mechanism that would save the response of the geonames.org to a local JSON file. This file would act as cache and it would have an expiration date. Until the cache expires it would use it to return the country information to the user. When the cache expiries it would try to fetch the data directly from geonames.org, if the fetch is successful it would update the cache file, if is not it would give the user the old response from the cache file even thought it is expired (better than returning to the user nothing).

Some of the requirements for the caching mechanism that I was thinking of are the following:

• The user needs to be able to disable the cache. This is mostly useful on development environments.
• Because some websites are multilingual and the language parameter may change dynamically, every time a new language get fetched a new cache file for that specific language need to be created, so the cache for new language won't overwrite the cache of the previous language.
• The path of the cache directory need to be configurable by the user.
• The name of the each cache file needs to be unique and part of it random, in case the cache directory that the user choose is used also by other modules.

What do you think?

Create separate file for Exception.

PHPUnit tests should be added

Replace SpoonHTTP by curl