Rior Documentation

This represents the alpha release of Rior. It works but needs major refactoring and will be highly inefficient on anything interesting. It is still in the proof of concept stage, but with a clear upgrade path when the time comes.

What Rior is

Rior is a database abstracting layer. Specifically, it is designed to ease development of dynamicly generated websites with the Ante web template engine. Rior is an easy way of adding specific meta information about a table or a column in a table that is accessible by the Ante engine.

Rior's use

At this point, I'm not recommending Rior's use. It works, but is still proof of concept. It may be interesting to people who plan to develop sites with Ante to understand the thought process of its developer on how to use Ante (ie. feed dynamic data to Ante).

Rior's future

Update: 16 July 2008. I've found some time and have been doing a lot of work. I've even solved the n+1 problem (in a way that I don't think will be useful for most ORM solutions, unfortunately... it takes advantage of the knowledge Rior is for building web pages.) Anyway, hopefully I'll be able to get a working copy with all my work included on this site in the next few days. At which point we'll move into beta instead of alpha. :) That means I'll be looking for users to use the Rior library. The project TODO list gets longer by the day, but the TODOs are successively more where I'd like to go oriented as opposed to just getting it working in a mostly efficient manner.

You can download the last (pre n+1 fix) upload or look at some new documentation. (Note the diagram shows Rior::query($t,$ds). There is no such method yet. And even when it does occur, it'll be more complicated than that as you have to specify a whole lot of config stuff such as database connection info, database schema info, etc. Take a look at index.php for a sample of how I do that.)

When will Rior be usable? That's anyone's guess. I've created this almost as much to use for testing Ante as anything else. I want to get Ante in better shape before really tackling the necessary improvements for Rior. I want to, but time is at premium. If anyone looks at it and can make heads or tails out of it, they're welcome to attempt refactoring to see if they can make it better or faster. Some obvious places to improve include:

• parallel table loads When multiple rows of table A is loaded and and each refers to a row in table B, right now it would load each row as a seperate SQL call
• multiple databases interfaces Right now only mysql is supported
• Filling in the interface in the AwDBColumn class to pass up the info about whether the column is editable etc. This should not take long (?)
• Post backs Since I'm focused on Ante and Ante's about getting info onto the page, I only did one direction of data
• Write a reverse engineering script to grab meta data out of a database and create the $tables array and move that $tables array into a seperate file
• Making a proper component of the riordb.inc classes so that they can be chosen at run time instead of hard coded into the rior.inc file.