Mika Tuupola

The latest releace candidate of DB_DataContainer now supports also PHP5. Official release will follow shortly if no bugs are found. Also to those who might be interested a port to PDO is under its way. The class will be called PDO_DataContainer.

While browsing through similar projects I found out something that I haven't noticed before. Propel uses the same approach of having just one save() method instead of separate insert() and update() methods to persist the object into the database. I never understood the reason of having different method call for INSERT and UPDATE which is what most of the persistence layers and alike have. If the object has primary key set you know you have to do an UPDATE. If primary key is not set you know you have to do and INSERT.

In the latest edition of International PHP Magazine Daniel Convissor gives an overview of the new Features in the PEAR::DB 1.6.x releases. The article is called PEAR DB: Ripe for the Picking.

Two solid months of tilling the proverbial soil, committing over 500 bits of fertilizer and squishing 90 documented bugs—and countless undocumented ones—has brought PEAR’s most popular package to a new state of maturity. It is stable and fully tested on most of the supported DBMS’s. The new release focuses on portability, allowing you to write applications that can be used with a wide variety of database back-ends.

You just have to love Sebastian Bergmann’s Image_GIS. With few lines of geospatial data you are able to produce nice map of Finland. A bigger version

After 8-10 hours of work including both PHP and HTML code I'm quite happy with the results I achieved. Being HTML-challenged person such as myself I would like to thank Tigris.org for their Apache licensed stylesheets and PEAR community for providing the allways so usefull PHP components. At the time of writing PEAR classes used were: DB, Net_URL, Net_Socket, HTTP_Request and Cache_Lite. Additionally PEAR compliant DB_DataContainer was also used.