Will Gibson wrote:

> I'm looking to develop a web application for a product with an embedded database - hence Firebird. I've spent some time investigating various approaches trying to consider (a) breadth and quality of libraries available and (b) ease of understanding and use (this is my first real bit of programming work so this is relevant!)

Research available applications as well. I started with a package that
used ADOdb. Not a lot of the original package remains, but ADOdb is core
to everything else.
I'm migrating everything over to Tikipro, which will provide the
authentication and user management layer along with a lot more - manages
ADOdb and Smarty ;)

> Starting with Dreamweaver this uses ADOdb for connecting to Firebird and automates a lot of code generation for basic database connectivity, recordsets etc.. But I can see that for a reasonably sophiticated application a closer handle on the writing the code is required (also I've seen that ADOdb is somewhat "bulky" and may affect performance). To facilitate database connectivity and standard tasks I've been looking at PEAR. This seems to have advantages of breadth of packages available and established quality - e.g. templating (although SMARTY seems popular for this), authentication etc... For ease of use I've played with ezSQL a bit which seems hard to beat.

ezSQL is nice. The next release of PHP (5.1) should have PDO which is
PHP's attempt to standardise the database interface, but it is only
addressing the lowers layers in this version.
I gave up on PEAR, but mainly because ADOdb did what I wanted at that
time, and I have not looked again.

> Firebird is probably a reasonably settled choice of database - so is using an abstraction layer relevant? Each approach probably has pros and cons: any thoughts from you experienced people on most important factors and considerations would be welcome.

I have to access data from third party systems, so need the abstraction,
and also the things like 'pager' are useful, so I can't see a switch to
pure ibase_/fbird_, but PDO is the most likely candidate for that change
when (IF) it matures :)

--
Lester Caine
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L.S.Caine Electronic Services