I have continued with this experiment and created a new querying interface compatible with PHP 5.3 and has no dependent PECL extensions: Experiment update: revised Django-like PHP (5.3 compatible) querying interface.
So this is an experiment I’ve had in the making for quite some time. I’ve been working for years trying to build a reusable “generic object” querying framework that I made my PHP applications easier to maintain and faster to develop. I originally started with a small library of classes, including a ‘GenericObject’ class and a ‘Collection’, which allowed for proper iteration using the Iterator interface — all wrapped around a very messy Factory design pattern.
Up until about a year, I used hacked and modified versions of these classes for all of my projects and was getting tired of the mess. After doing some casual research I finally came across the Django Framework and found the object creation and database querying quite phenomenal as a programming interface. I didn’t want to spend years trying to get my Python up to par with my abilities with PHP, so I decided to try and replicate it. For the last year, again, I’ve been using a pretty hacked up version of what seemed to me like a “Django-like” interface, combined together with my old GenericObject and Collection classes from long before. With this, I was previously able to perform really simple database queries with an interface like so:
$users = User::get(array("fullname__contains" => "Andrew"));
foreach($users as $user) {
// ...
}