Database Wrappers and POG

Each time you generate an object using Php Object Generator, you have 2 ways of obtaining your code. The first is to simply copy and paste the generated code from a text area. The second is to download a zipped file which contains your object along with a configuration file and a database class.

This Database class(class.database.php) is required by your object so that it can perform database operations such as “Save”, “Delete”, “Get” etc. It’s also important to note that currently, this database wrapper is specific to MySQL only and won’t work if you’re planning to use other databases, such as Oracle.

Here’s a diagram that shows how the POG database wrapper fits in the overall picture of things.

However, as PHP matures, there are new sets of standard libraries being developed for it, and as from version 5.1, PHP includes a native Database Object Library called PDO. There’s also an open source project that implements PDO for PHP 4.

From the PHP website:
The PHP Data Objects (PDO) extension defines a lightweight, consistent interface for accessing databases in PHP. Each database driver that implements the PDO interface can expose database-specific features as regular extension functions. Note that you cannot perform any database functions using the PDO extension by itself; you must use a database-specific PDO driver to access a database server.

PDO provides a data-access abstraction layer, which means that, regardless of which database you’re using, you use the same functions to issue queries and fetch data. PDO does not provide a database abstraction; it doesn’t rewrite SQL or emulate missing features. You should use a full-blown abstraction layer if you need that facility.

PDO ships with PHP 5.1, and is available as a PECL extension for PHP 5.0; PDO requires the new OO features in the core of PHP 5, and so will not run with earlier versions of PHP.

As PDO becomes the defacto database access library for PHP, (as we believe it will) we want you to know that we’ll make sure POG generates objects that are compatible with PDO.

So, if you decide to make your generated object compatible with PDO instead of POG’s `default` wrapper, here’s a diagram that shows how things will look like:

You can hopefully see now why we’re working to make POG compatible with PDO in the near future. This way, as a developer, you’ll be able to choose your preferred database without having to rewrite hundreds, if not thousands of lines of code.

As soon as POG becomes compatible with PDO, we’ll announce it on this blog and PDO should also appear as a choice in the database wrapper drop down list.