Recently I was attempting to test a web application using BrowserCam. BrowserCam has a bank of virtual machines on different versions of many platforms including Apple OSX, Linux Fedora, and Windows. While attempting to regression test in older versions of IE I noticed I absolutely could not log in to my application. This only occured on BrowserCam. After testing other CI based sites over BrowserCam I eventually narrowed it down to CodeIgniters session library. The session library that ships with CI does not use the native PHP session based files. It instead stores everything in an encrypted cookie. I think this is bad for two reasons: One, it goes against a PHP developers conventional wisdom of how sessions are handled and two, cookies have a storage limitation.
After poking around for some solutions I determined everything out there would cause me to have to change a lot of code. I needed a drop in replacement that would cause me minimal changes. I wrote the following library called Trusession. You simply drop it into your application/libraries folder and do some simple find and replaces. Trusession has most of the same method names, parameters, and return values as CodeIgniters native session library so your application should start working again out of the box except it will now be using PHPs file based sessions. There are a few of the public methods that I did not implement, calling these will result in an exception telling you that it has not been implemented and will give you a stack trace. These can easily be implemented by reverse engineering the CI Session library.
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