Goal

This project is meant to replace the PHP interface that comes with Dia2Postgres ; while it was originally started using PHP 4, the messy OO interface made it impossible to continue without switching to PHP 5.

It consists in a set of classes to be loaded and initialized whenever a session is started, be it a new session or an already existing session. Those classes allow the programmer to define classes that mirror tables from a Postgres database.
Each instance of these classes is able to access to a single row and allows the user to read and modify rows directly through an instance's properties.

Requirements

The final version should offer the following features :

• as transparent as can be done : the user shouldn't be bothered with long initialization calls ; in the same spirit it should be easy to define a class linked to a database table.
• support for complex relationships : the user should be able to use both Postgres and Dia2Postgres inheritance rules, as well as using foreign keys.
• support for transactions : by default all the actions would be executed inside a single transaction ; it would be possible to commit or roll back the current transaction at any time, thus reseting the objects' status.
• support for callbacks : it should be possible to mark an object to be kept under surveillance and have specific code executed in case some event affects its data ; different events such as deletion, row modification or cell modification should be available, and multiple handlers might be present for the same event.

Status

IMPORTANT NOTE: this project is still in its early stages. DO NOT use it in a production environment. For now, please avoid reporting bugs, since the code you are talking about may disappear at any time.

• A first set of tests were run using PHP 4. Those tests led to the conclusion that PHP 4's OO support is far too unreliable for this project.
• A new version has been written using PHP 5 ; it has complete support for foreign keys and intermediary tables. Unfortunately, it has been written as a part of the future Nocternity web site. The code is currently being modified so that it may be used independently.

Files

• PHP 4 tests: some parts are missing, it's quite unusable and it tends to crash the PHP interpreter. A lot. You have been warned.
• ObjCache v0.1 (ALPHA) will be available once I'm done extracting it from the new site's code.

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