Friday, March 23, 2007

Qcodo

In my random internet wandering today, I stumbled upon a fairly slick PHP Development Framework called Qcodo. One of the things I dislike the most about PHP is the tendency to mix in PHP code with the HTML. This can make maintenance of the site fairly messy, and breaks the mantra of separating the data and implementation from the presentation.

Qcodo is a framework built from the ground up to address this issue. It works from a base data model (e.g. database schema) and builds up objects which map to this data model. It features some pretty slick code creation that also creates default HTML forms for adding, editing, listing and deleting this data as well. Toss in some AJAX functionality for good measure, and you have yourself one heck of a package.

About the only negative points I can see right now are the following:
  1. It is still in the beta stage, so if you decide to give it a whirl, expect some issues and future changes.
  2. It requires PHP 5 and MySQL. If you only have PHP version 4 installed, it is a show stopper. The developers of Qcodo are working on database adapters to support DBs other than MySQL (such as PostgreSQL), so this particular issue may fall by the wayside in a future release.
I'd recommend you visit the Qcodo website and take some time and look through the screencasts they provide - it is very impressive.

2 comments:

  1. Hi there,

    just wanted to say, that I tried out the framework a few month ago and it was already very stable. The only issue for me was the lag of support of self-referencing tables (for example a 'page' belongs to another 'page').

    But once you have tried the framework and experienced the ease of use, you never want to go back to anything else ;-)

    Greetings,
    AL

    ReplyDelete
  2. Thanks much for the comment! The next serious app for which I need to use PHP, I think I'll give Qcodo a try (if PostgreSQL support is included).

    ReplyDelete