[consulting] CiviCRM / Zend Framework / DBTNG

[Joe Murray]

Just speculating still, but if DBTNG has a fairly cleanly severable
interface, and CiviCRM core were to use it, there would be little bloat for
CiviCRM for Joomla. CiviCRM for Joomla doesn't really get used as a
development framework in the way that CiviCRM for Drupal does, just because
of what the CMSes are good for. I get that there is an unnecessary new layer
for CiviCRM which is a drag. I'm still unclear if there might be an upside
in terms of making CiviCRM integrated with Fields, Views, etc as 'native'
objects rather than as external objects with 'plug-ins' written for them.

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


On Fri, May 7, 2010 at 1:32 PM, Sami Khan <sami at etopian.net> wrote:

> There are plenty of well defined PHP ORM projects out there; also
> another abstraction layer over PDO which is already a database
> abstraction layer just to do it the Drupal way doesn't make sense to me.
>
> Sami
>
> On Fri, 2010-05-07 at 09:56 -0700, Michael Prasuhn wrote:
> > Well, what the database layer in Drupal 7 does and doesn't do is a little
> blurry sometimes. For the most part it functions as primarily a query
> builder and abstraction layer (now supporting 5 databases!*). It is not
> however, an ORM. In that sense DBTNG isn't really suited for any type of
> data structure over any other type. Drupal 7 is focusing some of the
> functionality of an ORM at the entity level, with it's Field API. At this
> point, the line between easily removed library and tightly coupled code is
> crossed, and that functionality isn't possible without moving most of the
> functionality into Drupal.
> >
> > Could a simple ORM be built on top of DBTNG? I don't see why not, but at
> that point it's not really a 'Drupal like API' anymore, and you'd be back to
> where you started, although the ORM code would look more familiar to Drupal
> developers.
> >
> > -Mike
> >
> > *MySQL, PostgreSQL, SQLite, Oracle, and MS SQL Server
> > __________________
> > Michael Prasuhn
> > mike at mikeyp.net
> > http://mikeyp.net
> >
> > On May 7, 2010, at 6:12 AM, Joe Murray wrote:
> >
> > > 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
> >
> > _______________________________________________
> > consulting mailing list
> > consulting at drupal.org
> > http://lists.drupal.org/mailman/listinfo/consulting
>
>
>
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