David Dyess .com

Although I haven’t had a lot of computer time lately, I’ve really been enjoying the new Ubuntu. It seems to run better than the version I had to drop and I haven’t missed Windows at all this time. Wine is finally working for me this time around and I’m currently installing Eve Online. We’ll see if that works out or not here shortly.

I’ve had way more time to think about Clay than to actually work on it this month. One of my bad habits is to never let something fully materialize before I begin redoing it. Clay has kind of fallen victim to my bad habit. Luckily this time I’ve done more thinking than redoing.  So, one of my priorities right now is to write up a road map for Clay 1.0 and decide how to step it up from 1.x to the new ideas for Clay 2.0. One of the things I have to keep reminding myself is that Clay is a framework, not a CMS. My focus is currently 90% framework (libraries, modules), 10% applications available. As Clay matures, during the 1.x phases for instance, I’ll shift the focus more to applications.

I want to get into desktop software development. I’ve looked at a few languages and I don’t feel like I’ve learned enough PHP to begin splitting my time just yet. One thing I’ve considered is adding PHP-GTK support to Clay, or perhaps just creating a new version of Clay specifically for PHP-GTK. Just a thought, but I think it could be a pretty good thought

That’s it for now… sleepy time for me.

I’ve been needing to test the Clay Framework on Linux, and didn’t want to put it on my host’s server, so I decided to give Ubuntu another try. I’m really impressed so far, although I’ve only been running it for 15 minutes. I had to revert back to Vista, which I later reverted back to XP, back when Ubuntu 8.04 was released. It was just too glitchy at the time.

I back on the boat now, hopefully I wont going back to XP except for testing Clay

I’m still working on it I’ve cleaned out a lot of test code and transitioned entirely to ClayDB. Currently ClayDB only has an inteface for queries through the PDO_MySQL driver, but it should support SQLite soon as well. I decided to start out with PDO, instead of the native drivers, but I plan to eventually add support for mysql and mysqli. PDO has quickly become my favorite though.

I’ve been toying with the DataDictionary, but real life work has hampered my efforts in getting a lot finished on Clay lately. One of the features I’ve experimented with is type casting DB fields. Basically, if you need a primary key column you just specify ‘id’ as the field type and the class fills in the rest when the table is created. Same goes for when the needed field type is ’string’, ‘numeric’, ‘integer’, or ‘boolean’. One of the ideas for later on is to map types so when you create a table the data types are always validated for queries.

I’ve done a few other things here and there, but those are the most significant. Until next time…

I’ve been grinding away at the ClayDB abstraction layer, but it’s mostly been experimenting. I do have some solid methods going and have began adding the new calls here in there for testing though. So far you can do anything basic with a single line of code. For instance:

$profiles = $db->get(‘fname, lname, jdate FROM profiles WHERE userid = ?’, array($userid), ‘0,1′);

will give you one row as:

$profiles['fname']

$profiles['lname']

$profiles['jdate']

delete(), update(), and add() are available as well.  I hope to be able to implement something similar for transactions, more than likely splitting the queries with arrays. I have other plans as well, but those are the ones I’m worried about for now.

I kept bouncing back and forth on whether or not to go forward with ClayDB, even replacing Creole with dbFacile and then undoing it. Needless to say, I’ve prolonged the inevitable and ended up only wasting time. Fortunately, ClayDB is the fastest I’ve used so far (for development and performance), I guess time has to be made up some how.

I’ll try to start posting a little more regularly… no promises though.