[consulting] CiviCRM / Zend Framework / DBTNG

[Joe Murray]

I'm trying to get my head around architectural options for CiviCRM 4.0 that
might allow one to more easily leverage of 'Drupal as a developer framework'
as opposed to 'Drupal as user CMS'. This would IMHO meet a CiviCRM goal of
increasing its developer community.

I just want to talk about the database layer right now to keep things
focussed. One of the frameworks being consider as a replacement for the PEAR
library (DBDataObject and HTML Quickform in particular) is the Zend
Framework. It uses PDO libraries. DBTNG for Drupal 7, as I understand it,
also sits on top of PDO. I find Mike Prasuhn's information about the
modularity of the Drupal 7 db layer to be very interesting. For those who
don't know, CiviCRM currently uses a fairly traditional tiered architecture,
and generates its data layer code from an XML representation of its data
schema for the most part (some business layer logic bypasses the Data
Application Object (DAO) layer by reading directly from the MySQL tables for
optimization purposes, for example). I imagine that the DBTNG layer is
focussed on supporting Drupal data structures, but I believe it has some
support for creating access to arbitrary non-Drupal data stores as well,
which CiviCRM might qualify as.

Is it remotely feasible to think of using DBTNG as the primary database
layer for CiviCRM 4.0? What is the overhead of using for non-Drupal sites?
Or is it better to imagine setting up access to the couple hundred tables in
CiviCRM via DBTNG's external datasource structure, and then using that as a
good way to integrate with fields, views and that good stuff?

Just trying to explore whether there is some common ground here.

Joe Murray, PhD
President, JMA Consulting
joe.murray at jmaconsulting.biz
skype JosephPMurray twitter JoeMurray
416.466.1281
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