Re: Application settings, configuration, and preferences.

On Wed, Oct 27, 2010 at 5:27 PM, <mmestnik@nagios.com> wrote: > Recently we had a discussion about weather our code should be configured > using files or a DB back-end. As this topic effects nearly every > development team I was wondering if there shouldn't be a common library > that deals with all of these issues. > > We came to the conclusion that either should work, but our project must > work on systems that would not have an SQLDB installed. There fore it > must be configured using files as supporting both would be a waste of > our development time. > > Looking around for a solution I came across an extension to getopt that > read command line parameters from a file, essentially emulating "exec > $(cat);". As this did allow configuration from either the command line > or a file it's a good start. However we are specificually looking for > something that would accept configuration from a file or a DB, command > line options are not important. Though a great solution would take > configuration from anywhere. > > A full featured solution would also support containing user preferences > and administrative settings. Allowing any of these to come from almost > anywhere. Here is how an example deployment might work. As this would > be a programming tool the user would be an administrator installing and > configuring the software. > > Some configuration information contained in php should be extensible so > that all the configuration could be done there. In this case settings > and user preferences would be read-only, configuration information is > always read-only. This would usually specify a config file to be > located in the same folder or a subfolder. > > This configuration file would have a default format that is configurable > in the php. Would be one of PHP, XML, bind, apache, and several other > config file formats. This file would contain information on where > settings and preferences could be written to, either another > configuration file some where in /var or connection information for a DB. > > From an application developers stand point this should all be as > difficult as getopt to setup, design decisions like what format the > config file is in should be left up to the admin installing the > software. The developer need only be concerned with defining the values > stored, there type, and other properties. > > Does anything like this exist? This seams like an essential piece of > code that is re-invented for every project. > > PEAR's Config package sounds like a good match for what you are looking for. It parses and outputs various formats and edits existing config files http://pear.php.net/package/Config There's a brief intro to what it can do at http://pear.php.net/manual/en/package.configuration.config.intro.php I have to admit I am somewhat biased as I'm currently on the PEAR Group (read 'committee') - but I'd be surprised if there's not a Zend or ezComponents/zetaComponents equivalent. I also have to admit there are some outstanding issues that need to be addressed for PEAR's Config package - the good news is someone has volunteered to resolve these today. Good luck, Ken > -- > Mike Mestnik > Technical Team > ___ > Nagios Enterprises, INC. > Email: mmestnik@nagios.com > Web: www.nagios.com > > -- > PHP General Mailing List (http://www.php.net/) > To unsubscribe, visit: http://www.php.net/unsub.php > > -- http://blogs.linux.ie/kenguest/