> 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!)

> 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.

> 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.


[Alan McDonald] One more comment to all the above... I chose ezSQL.
1. It stil ofers layers to other db's
2. You can pull the FB layer (or whatever) out of the whole package and with
the master layer code and the specialised FB layer code, you only need 2
files to deploy. This means that the whole deployment is 10K and an
additional "results" class is 13K (with all the comment code stripped out as
well) - that's it. You'll see how that compares with ADOdb.

My choice was based on speed and there is no feature that I don't have or
want.

Alan


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