Making stuff as a founder of Avocado. Former music-maker. Tuna melt advocate. Started Google Reader. (But smarter people made it great.)

Without a pear, I improvise.

Many application developers shy away from database abstraction tools, in part because of the overhead and new APIs they have to learn, but also because it's difficult for those tools to port complex instructions and queries to each different RDBMS. Abstraction is also made difficult because some of the more popular database systems include vendor-only features.

But I have needs that abstraction would solve - particularly as I work on applications with large and diverse user bases.

And in the case that these users are creating PHP-based applications with my platforms on remotely hosted machines then my job becomes especially difficult since these users might not have the luxury of having PEAR installed.

So, I found myself creating a couple of helpful things.

  1. A basic database abstraction class for MySQL, Oracle, and MS Access.
  2. Access to the $SERVER and $REQUEST and $SESSION objects that respect variant settings of register_globals.
The latter bit has saved my bacon. (I wonder if it would help anyone else. Might be a corner case as a lot of PHP development in-the-wild is moving to use the more secure setting of register_globals.)

I'll post 'em, just in case. Because. You know. Wheel re-inventing avoidance.

1. Massless' PHP Database Abstraction Class
2. Massless' PHP Request, Server, and Session Wrappers

Mmm. Dying to post about my Javascript XMLTreeEditor and Calendar objects. But I have to get ready for some shows...

Citizens goes north.
The Small Hours goes late. (And please don't tell anyone.)

Posted at September 24, 2003 03:02 PM
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"Extending Your Forms"