04.02.07

Red Pill

Posted in Coding, Rants, Site News at 8:35 am

And today is when reality starts to set in as April Fool’s gags are revealed. I managed to snag one of the ThinkGeek shirts, so I’m looking forward to that; also, the 8-bit Tie is so going to be mine. Not that I ever actually wear ties, and the few times that I do wear a tie I can’t conceivably be expected to wear that one, but… all right, so maybe I won’t get it. Anyway.

You might have noticed that I abandoned the “30 Days” idea. This is because I sort of got preoccupied and wound up not getting enough suggestions. All right, I got one. In any event, I have coding to do for the next couple days/weeks, so I’m more or less tied up. I should probably give you all an update on what’s being done… sounds like a plan.

I’ve been working on creating a simpler way of dealing with databases in PHP; my solution thus far is called Ether. It doesn’t stand for anything but it does sort of work like magic. The idea is to get database rows into PHP as quickly as possible and with as little transformation as possible. Ether pulls a table row out and turns it into a PHP object, adding a couple additional properties for its own use. All that’s really required is that the table have an identifier called “id” (I now realize that I ought to refactor this to be configurable). It also only works with MySQL for the time being, but most PHP setups also use MySQL. Porting it to other platforms is a job for other people, I suppose. Anyway, right now it’s in a partially-completed state; it can read and save rows/objects, and can also create new ones. The next major step is to get it to automatically make forms based on the database tables, and that’s partly done as well; after that, I’ll be working towards the first project to use it in a production environment (technically, the old blog archive was created using Ether, but it was the no-form alpha version). That will probably be yet another update of First and Last… maybe. I still haven’t decided just what I want to do with it, and First and Last is not really a suitable demonstration of what the system can do.

The ultimate goal for Ether is to make PHP application development much, much faster. Once the database design is set up, a very large chunk of coding is usually devoted to making forms and handling database input/output. The idea is that most of that coding is pretty much the same, and that once the database design is done, the majority of the coding is also done. It’s not very advanced stuff, and I’m sure I’ll have some kinks to work out, but the concept seems pretty solid. More than that, even if all I get out of it is the knowledge that there’s something out there that already does this, it’s still a good exercise.

Aaaaaaaaanyway. Last day at work for me, then all sorts of interesting stuff to be done. Catch you cats later.

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