A Path Less Taken

In a recent post I touted the coolness factor of the Spot ORM. Based on a response to that post I prepared this short tutorial on how to get started. This is culled from personal experience and guidance that I received from the software’s author. I hope this is helpful to you if you are interested in giving Spot a try.

No, this is not about Doctrine and Propel, although I’m sure those are both really fine PHP ORM tools if you are willing to endure the learning curve. This is about 2 lesser known but notable ORM tools that deserve a nod of recognition. I’ve tried a number of PHP ORM tools over the last year and many of them had merit. In fairness, as you look at one attempt you begin to realize how much each of them owes to those that came before them. There are so many variations on a theme that you can easily get confused and give up in frustration. But my recent efforts have revealed two that I find very useful and note worthy depending on your project. Here is a quick run down on each.

My latest experiment is building a new site without leveraging one of the many MVC Frameworks that are out there today. I decided to approach a new project using the following criteria:

• Simple can be better sometimes.
• Frameworks don’t do EVERYTHING well.
• Components that do one job and do it well are easier.
• Easier can be more productive.

To be fair, my results were a mixed bag, but so far I’m happy with the experiment. The site is not open to the public yet, but you can check out the current version here if you are curious how it is going. Below is a brief out line of the tools I used and the results (good, bad and ugly)!

Please allow me to introduce Formed, a simple PHP based HTML form generator class. The primary objectives I had when creating Formed were:

• Simple to Use
• Customizable using HTML formatting or CSS
• Self Contained (no framework dependencies)
• Template Support

I created a home site for it in the event that people wanted to try it, make suggestions (be nice), provide changes, that kind of thing. It is not on GitHub because it does not warrant that level of control at this point. The site is built on Joomla and the template is one of the defaults that I barely modified so it looks funny. If you go to the link above you can down load the zip file or read the tutorial. If you are interested check it out and post a comment here.

As a side note, PHP CMS tools must be in a tragic state these days. Joomla was easy enough to get working, but it is far from intuitive when you first use it. By contrast Drupal I could not even get working on Apache. To be fair I did not put much time into either one, but isn’t that the point of a CMS? It is a sorry state of affairs.

One thing I love about the open source community is all you need is another motivated, talented programmer with an opinion and change happens. I just found another new PHP Framework that has waded into the fray (at least from my perspective). It’s call DOOPHP and it has an interesting take on magic methods. The author’s contention on the about page is that magic methods rob frameworks of performance. I don’t know if that’s worth building a new solution over, but it could be worth a look. Enjoy.