Re: the future of database packages in PEAR

On 12/14/06, Mark Wiesemann <wiesemann@php.net> wrote:

Lukas Kahwe Smith wrote: It would be nice if the current people working on Database related stuff speak up (Justin, Alan, Mark, David) on their take. I had a deep look into Doctrine's documentation and like the package. As you already wrote, it lacks support of generating forms. My plan a few months ago was to make a PHP 5 version of DB_Table. This makes only sense if there is a PHP 5 databases abstraction layer and PHP 5 form generation class in PEAR. The last one (HTML_QuickForm2) is on its way, the first one is not (I don't know about plans for MDB3). Using PDO would be an alternative, of course. But my time is limited due to my studies (I'd like to get finished with them in 2007) and I don't think that I'll work on an successor of DB_Table in the next months (at least not alone). David Morse is going to finish his work on the Database extension for DB_Table in the next weeks and we are going to make a new release then. My conclusion: It would be possible to either make DB_Table PHP 5 compatible or to add form generation abilities to Doctrine. I think it makes sense to do only one of these two possibilites to avoid duplicate work with very similar goals. But I'm unsure which way would be the best to go.

As I've mentioned before I've already made a start on a FormBuilder2 code-base which is PHP5 only and would be able to use any DB or Form package. If we pull in a PHP5-only DB package which is decent and we have a good PHP5 form package (QF2) then it could be possible to either build it with those defaults ot simply build a form-building package tht connects the 2. I'm of the mind that form capabilities really belong in another package, not in the data-object implementation. -- Justin Patrin