In previous posts by my colleagues Martin and Lineke you could already read that caching is becoming important when you are going to build scalable web applications. For many projects we use ATK as our framework, but it didn't have a caching API. So in the core of our products we only use file caching because that's available on all systems. If you wanted to use an external cache, for example Zend Platform, this was mostly done in a custom module. This made sure we didn't get large if-constructions in the core products to check for availability of an external cache.

That was, until yesterday... because now there is a cache object (atkCache) available in the ATK SVN trunk. The new atkCache class is a factory class, which builds and returns instances of atkCache which has all the methods to communicate with an external cache to handle the actual storage and retrieval.
At this moment atkCache has support for the following caching backends: