Archives for PHP

Multiple databases in Drupal

Have to say, while MDB2 has the more straightforward way of accessing multiple databases (just create more database objects using MDB2::factory()), drupal’s way of doing things is a long way from horrible.

To initialise:

$db_url[‘default’] = ‘mysql://drupal:drupal@localhost/drupal’;
$db_url[‘mydb’] = ‘mysql://user:pwd@localhost/anotherdb’;
$db_url[‘db3′] = ‘mysql://user:pwd@localhost/yetanotherdb’;

And then to use:

db_set_active(‘mydb’);
db_query(‘SELECT * FROM table_in_anotherdb’);
//Switch back to the default connection when finished.
db_set_active(‘default’);

Quite straightfoward looking. Now to see if it actually works! :-)

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4's dead baby

So PHP 4.4.8 is released, and that’s it for the whole PHP 4 line. No further normal releases are due and PHP 4 is no longer supported. Hopefully this will mean that the takeup figures for 5 get a sudden sharp upwards jolt!

It’s going to be interesting to watch as major apps like Drupal change over from having to provide legacy support for PHP4 and can start to use the better object model in 5 – the question will be, will we see an improvement in the quality of coding as the mainstream toolset improves?

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Reaching the limits of PHP

First off, I rather like PHP. PHP 5 at least, I think PHP 4 was – and remains – a dog’s dinner of a thing at best. But for 90% (at least) of webpages, PHP is a pretty decent solution. Retrieval of data from databases, display of that data, no worries. Minimal learning curve, support for high-level constructs like objects and exceptions, several frameworks available – PHP’s a damn good choice in the vast majority of cases.

Thing is, right now I’m trying to put together a bit of code to act as a proof of concept, and – more fool me – I tried to use PHP to do it, figuring I’d save some time. No such luck. Turns out, trying to create data in PHP is a lot harder than trying to manipulate or display it. Right now, I’m in the middle of implementing a recognition system using a variable order markov model approach, and just generating the PPM-C prefix trees is a total pain in the fundament. Even the basic data structure I’m using – a trie – has no standard implementation in PEAR or the SPL or anywhere else I could find. So first I have to write that. Then I have to write the code to do all the other stuff. I mean, granted, hoping to find a pre-written PPM library was a bit hopeful, but prefix trees are basic data structures (and yes, I eventually found some sample code for one, but I’m still having to kick that about a fair bit to get what I need from it). But there was other stuff that I tried and ran into problems with. For example, PEAR::Math_Matrix seems to be PHP4 only, and the PEAR version doesn’t want to even parse in PHP5, let alone let … Read the rest

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Prado

On a seperate project from the PEAR work I’ve been doing of late, I’ve just rewritten an earlier project to use the Prado framework. I spent some time a while back looking at various frameworks, and in the end came down to a choice between Symfony and Prado. Because of the way this current project works, I thought Prado’s event-driven model was an easier fit than Symfony’s MVC model. Mind you, for other projects (including the one I was using PEAR for), I think Symfony would be ideal (and I didn’t use it earlier only because of time pressure).

Happily, the front-end of the project I was refactoring into Prado had no work done on it at all (the previous version was effectively a proof-of-concept with all the work in the back end). Still though, if I had to do it over, I’d probably quote an extra week and rewrite the whole thing from scratch using ActiveRecord instead of the custom database interaction I had in this version.

Some of the stuff in Prado isn’t quite as optimal as I’d hoped, mind. For example, nesting templates in Prado doesn’t work fully in that if you have Template C nested in Template B nested in Template A, then a variable in Template A is not visible at all to Template C, and the code attached to Template C can’t change it. So you have to have a TContentPlaceholder in Template A and a TContent linked to that in Template B, containing a TContentPlaceholder which a TContent in Template C links to and that TContent in Template C contains the actual content. It’s suboptimal and messy, because you’re effectively doing inheritance on a pseudo-object by hand, and typos can waste lots of your time, not to mention the headache of keeping it … Read the rest

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PEAR::Structures_Datagrid

Okay, so to all those who wrote this lovely little library, thank you!
Refactoring old code to use this wound up saving me quite a few days of programming time and let me export Excel files instead of the usual cheat (although if it gives a more portable format, is it really a cheat?) of exporting CSV files.

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