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Posted by ooba gooba on 03/06/07 01:13
After doing some work in both Java and ASP.NET, I came back to add some
major enhancements to a PHP 4 application I built several years ago. A
lot of the database access is currently sprinkled throughout the
application.
In the Java and .NET worlds, I would do data access code by creating
classes that would handle all of the data access for each of the
application data entities. This worked great and kept all the data
access in one clearly designated set of classes.
I thought I would apply the same concept to PHP. However, it isn't
working well, and here's why:
- Because I'm using MySQL 4.1 and MyISAM tables (InnoDB is too darn
big), I have to manage all the relationships myself.
- If I need to delete an entity that has a lot of relationships, I have
to delete the records from all the related tables. I can do this by
either (a) making direct calls to MySQL to delete records from all the
related tables, or (b) if this was Java or .NET, I would simply make
calls to the related data objects. Since some of the related tables also
had related operations to perform, I started revising my PHP code to use
the latter method. So my code started to look like this:
class HcsDBO
{
// Delete an HCS and all its related records
function Delete($hcs)
{
if (!empty($hcs))
{
HospitalsDBO::DeleteHCSHospitals($hcs);
UsersDBO::DeleteHCSUsers($hcs);
BillToDBO::Delete($hcs);
DuesDBO::Delete($hcs);
// Now delete the HCS record
global $db;
$sql = "DELETE FROM HCS WHERE EntityID=$hcs";
$db->Query($sql);
}
}
}
- In order to call these other data object methods, I need to include
their files. This means that whenever I need to perform any kind of HCS
operation, whether or not related tables are involved, I need to include
all the data access code for all the related tables. That's going to be
a LOT of code.
- Compiled (or pseudo-compiled) languages such as Java and .NET can pull
in called objects as needed. PHP doesn't. All that code is read and
parsed for every page that requires any of it.
I can't see that this approach is very efficient for PHP, but I don't
want to continue the "data access code is sprinkled everywhere"
approach. Unfortunately, the web host does not support PHP 5.
Is there a better solution, or should I revert to the "sql code
sprinkled everywhere" approach?
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