Question

Going from .Net to PHP because I want to explore the possibilities of the language I’m struggling to find some way to autogenerate a DAL. In .Net I’d just use visual studio to generate a datamodel, but how can I do that with PHP and MySQL, so I won’t have to hand-type in all the classes? My current PHP IDE is Aptana.

Answer 1

If you really want to jump into the idea behind PHP, and not just write .net style code in PHP, you need to move away from the Objects-all-over methods of .net.

As you’ve noticed, auto-generation of objects isn’t common in PHP. Which means that the solution to the problem should not rely on this.

Try creating more generic objects and taking advantage of inheritance to avoid object bloat. And more-over try to rely less on data transfer objects and more on creating complete object-as-tool objects.

You’ll find PHP to be much more of a joy to work with if you escape from the trappings of .net.

To put that in perspective, I don’t think in the 5 years I have done work in PHP professionally, on big-scale projects like army.mil, have I ever felt the need to create a full-on DAL to get the job done.

The biggest project I’ve worked on just has a system of model classes each of which carry a list of methods that poll the database for raw data and then pass that data into the final objects. (in this case articles that make up the articles on army.mil)

There simply isn’t a need for another layer between the model and the data in PHP. It almost always just means more work for no gain.

There are various reasons why they DO make sense in .net. Not the least of which being that they can be auto-generated trivially and therefore there is almost no time cost in having them.

That said, when encapsulated within the confines of a framework, DAL begins to make sense again. If your project is basic, I would suggest a framework like CodeIgniter. CI contains a really nice database abstraction system. It forgoes SQL in favor of methods that transform into whatever the particular database you’ve define in the configuration need. This serves the same purpose as a DAL. You are still creating the query in the model, and you still need to be aware of the structure of your database. But despite what .net want’s you to believe, those are really still concerns for .net DALs anyway.

However, to really GET what PHP is all about, you need to lose the trappings of a framework and work freely. PHP is a hacker language. It affords hacking. (as in seat-of-your-pants programming, not cracking, ok, both..) And that is really what you need to do to understand what the fuss is about.

Is it a double-edged sword? Totally. But playing fast-and-loose with code is where PHP comes into its own. There is a reason it is the goto language for speedy up-over-night startups.

Sorry for the long and technically off-topic answer. I hope you can forgive me. You said you have started to use PHP to understand the possibilities of it. If you keep going this way – you’ll decide it is weak, inaccurate, clumsy, and prone to errors; and you’ll miss all the greatness that it offers in its flexibility, extensibility, hack-ability, and spirit. I don’t want you to miss the point of the language.