POG 2.5 Released

This is perhaps the biggest update we’ve done at one time and we’re relieved it’s finally out of the door. Overall POG 2.5 is the result of developer feedback and our own observations while using POG recently in a few medium/large projects.

By dropping out-of-the-box support for databases other than MySQL for now, we’ve narrowed our focus in order to deliver a product which is more complete and stable. We also want to accelerate POG’s release cycle, and having to maintain several databases that very few POG users (including us) use was creating some slowdowns.

The purpose of this release is to improve on the code base that we had, and provide an even better PHP ORM generator which now fulfills, we believe, 99% of all db requirements in a typical web application. The implementation of Many-many relations in POG follows the mantra that we’ve had since day 1: Keep things clean, simple and easy to use. As such, when you generate Sibling (many-many) objects, you’ll quickly realize that you can almost forget/not care about how the relations are being handled on the database level and instead, focus on application logic. We’ve also kept most method interfaces consistent, for backward compatibility. Thus, upgrading a previous project to POG 2.5 shouldn’t be too difficult.

Setup has also been improved to provide a better scaffolding environment. The ability to re-initialize data in all your tables with a few clicks will surely be helpful. We know that it has for us.

Entire changelog

1. Dropped support for databases other than MYSQL
2. Improved Parent-Child (1-many, many-1) relations. Bug fixes include – checks that prevent same child from being added more than once to the childList – documented a php ‘bug’ where adding children through a loop must be done by reference – SetChildrenList now does what it was supposed to do: commits changes to the database, making previous children orphans.

3. Implemented Sibling (many-many) relations model in Generator as well as Setup
4. Table structures are now optimized (using NOT NULLS and Indexes)
5. New crud method: DeleteList
6. All %List CRUD methods have been made fairly consistent. They now accept the same field-comparator-value array variable ($fcv_array)
7. All %List CRUD methods are able to generate Disjunctive Normal Form (DNF) queries. i.e. queries containing “OR”
8. Improved setup options – table to object alignment – drop and recreate tables – drop, recreate tables and re-initialize data – allows bypassing of unit tests – warnings before destroying data – pagination
9. Fixed all reported/known bugs up to this date.
10. Fixed some issues (ajax) reported with Setup and IE7
11. Regenerate object url is now configurable
12. Updated all documentation
13. Fixed reported annoyances: – internal metadata array (pog_attribute_type) now keeps the attribute names in their original casing (instead of lower case). If you’re updating an existing project, this can now cause unpredictable results in badly formed Get%List request, if you used to pass attribute_name as lower case. Previously POG would produce the intended result but not anymore in this case. Please review your code thoroughly if you’re upgrading an existing project to 2.5. – Generator gives warning when the attribute list contains duplicates.