Zend DB

This is a very quick tutorial on how to allow developers to develop using the Zend Framework without having to or being able to install PDO on their servers.
I have to warn you though, this is not an official extension of the Zend Framework just yet.

I've put together a database admin application using the database functionality provided by the Zend Framework. Basically, it's a generic set of classes that allows people to quickly add, edit, delete, and view data in a database table. The nice thing is that this uses the Zend_DB_Table classes, so it should presumably work with just about any database supported by the Zend Framework. I've tried this on mySQL and sqlite, and it worked just fine on both. There are some limitations of course. Right now this will only work on tables that have auto-increment primary keys. I don't quite know how this would work with databases that don't have auto-increment such as Oracle - maybe this could have support for defining the sequence that should be used when inserting data. This is a PHP5 only class due to it's reliance on the Zend Framework.

This article contains a few examples on how to create and use data layer classes that was created by extending the Zend_Db_Table class from Zend Framework.

One of the incubator projects in the Zend Framework is Zend_Db_Xml. Zend_Db_Xml, also known as the XML Content Store (XCS), allows web applications that use XML data to easily update, save, and otherwise manage this data. In this article I will introduce the XCS persistence API and discuss an implementation using IBMÂ’s DB2 9 database with its pureXML technology. Finally, IÂ’ll discuss a sample social networking application to show how easy and fun it is to develop XML-centric applications using the XCS.

Welcome back for another edition of Zend Framework Hidden Gems. Finally we start on the weird and wonderful world of database abstraction with PHP5, PDO and Zend.