How to persist objects between requests in PHP

I've been using rails, merb, django and asp.net mvc applications in the past. What they have common (that is relevant to the question) is that they have code that sets up the framework. This usually means creating objects and state that is persisted until the web server is recycled (like setting up routing, or checking which controllers are available, etc).

As far as I know PHP is more like a CGI script that gets compiled to some bytecode each time it's run, and after the request it's discarded. Of course you can have sessions, to persist data between requests from the same user, and as I see there are extensions like APC, with which you can persist objects between requests at the server level.

My question is: how can one create a PHP application that works like rails and such? I mean an application that on the first requests sets up the framework, then on the 2nd and later requests use the objects that are already set up. Is there some built in caching facility in mod_php? (for example that stores the compiled bytecode of the executed php applications) Or is using APC or some similar extensions the only way to solve this problem? How would you do it?

Thanks.

EDIT: Alternative question: if I create a large PHP application that has a very large set up time, but minor running time (like in the frameworks mentioned above) then how should I "cache" the things that are already set up (this might mean a lot of things, except for maybe the database connections, because for that you have persistent connections in PHP already).

To justify large set up time: what if I'm using PHP reflection to check what objects are available and set the runtime according to that. Doing a lot of reflection is usually slow, but one has to do it only once (and re-evaluate only if the source code is modified).

EDIT2: It seems it's APC then. The fact that it caches bytecode automatically is good to know.

Not sure if APC is the only solution but APC does take care of all your issues.

First, your script will be compiled once with APC and the bytecode is stored in memory.

If you have something taking long time to setup, you can also cache it in APC as user data. For example, I do this all the time,

            $table = @apc_fetch(TABLE_KEY);

            if (!$table) {
                    $table = new Table(); // Take long time
                    apc_store(TABLE_KEY, $table);
            }

With APC, the task of creating table is only performed once per server instance.