VirtualThinking has officially released TWO libraries under the Creative Commons licensing scheme. First is the mMail PHP Class. mMail was created due to increasing frustration with the limitations of the built-in PHP mail() function, and the seemingly complex and obtuse installation and usage cases for other, popular-ish mail() function substitutes.
We also wanted to overcome the dependency on the mail() function’s lack of SMTP AUTH and non-existent support for secure SMTP sessions (i.e. ssl and tls).
Second is the mSess PHP Class. mSess was created due to an oddity in PHP5 that caused unreliable sessions. While not exhaustively proven, there was some evidence that the internal serializer/deserializer in PHP was having problems with certain types of data, especially when larger amounts of data were packed into the $_SESSION super-global.
The net effect was mysterious, silent truncations in session data that were “inexplicable”. Manual serialization efforts frequently returned errors on particular byte ranges.
While we could have modified the php.ini settings to make it use the built-in WDDX serializer to address this, we wanted to take the opportunity to develop a MySQL backend for use in projects that needed to work on shared hosts, with privacy issues due to session data being stored in plain text files in globally accessible temp folders.
