Object Relational Mapping (ORM) tools allow developers to interact with databases through objects. The basic object in the typical solution is the model. The model is essentially an object representation of a single table in the database. In fact, implementations that subscribe to the activerecord design pattern will often view the model as an object representation of a single row of a specific table. Since the target data store in most cases is an RDBMS (excluding the recent surge in distributed Document based DB’s) the typical ORM needs some way to represent foreign key relationships in an object oriented way. To facilitate this the field has evolved a set of conventions or names for foreign key (FK) relationships in the DB based on the object’s (table’s) role in the given index. Here is a brief but hopefully useful explanation of four relationship types.
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jonathangeiger of the Kohana PHP Framework community has been working hard lately on a new ORM that shows promise. The github repository can be found here if you would like to check the code out. I decided to point my PHP Code Explorer at it to figure out the Jelly object model. Below is a screen capture of what I found. You can click the image to see a larger view.
I hope this view is helpful to you. I know it helped me to get a better perspective of Jelly and how it was designed.
Update: The official Jelly web site can be found at http://jelly.jonathan-geiger.com/.
Object Relational Mapping (ORM) tools are software products designed to allow developers to work with relational database management systems (RDBMS) in an object oriented and database agnostic way. Their primary goal is to make the developer’s work easier and free them to focus on higher value aspects of their solutions. As a hobbyist programmer I have a limited amount of time to give to my projects. In the last year this realization has pushed me to look at development tools that can increase my productivity in the limited time available. Leveraging an ORM solution seemed like a natural step in that progression.
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I recently upgraded my test web server to PHP 5.3.0 and ran into a couple of minor errors in the Kohana PHP Framework as a result. The first issue I found was several extensions that I use were now compiled into PHP itself. This means they were no longer in the ext directory. These included php_pdo, php_mcrypt and php_mhash. You can find the solution to that issue here. You need to make sure you comment out the lines in php.ini that attempt to include these extensions. The second issue I found was the register_globals directive in the php.ini file was depricated as of PHP 5.3. This means you should set the register_globals directive to Off in the php.ini file. This is what was tripping me up. I hope this is helpful to some of you.
Although I’m sure there are more than this, here is quick run down on some PHP ORM solutions that I was able to find with limited searching. The first 2 seem to be the most popular ones. If you know of another good solution please post a comment.
