PDO_User and the effects of Slide Driven Development

Last Fall, Wez and I (and others) met up at the Zend conferrence in Burlingame, CA (US). This was primarily a pre-PDM checkin for those of us who wouldn't be able to make it to Paris to get our thoughts in on the direction of PHP6. Apart from these topics, Wez mentioned wanting to have a userspace bridge for implementing PDO drivers, but that there was entirely too much going on that was (in all honesty) more important.

I agreed on both counts. At the time I was doing my best to ignore the temptation to work on operator... Click through and you'll see just how weak willed I can be :)

Fast forward to last week in Orlando, FL (US) and the php|tek conferrence. As mentioned in earlier blog posts, I think my presentations went over okay for a first couple of talks, but if I have to make one complaint, it's that the subject matter was ill-aimed. I spoke to Sean (one of the conferrence organizers) after the closing keynote and asked him about the upcoming php|works conf in toronto. When he said that one of the focuses would be on database interaction (since it would be taking place along side db|works), my thoughts immediately jumped to the PDO userspace driver which had been running around the back of my mind for months.

By the end of my flight back I had half the implementation written and had generally come to the conclusion that the PDO API was pretty damned nice. Long story short, I've just uploaded release 0.1 of pdo_user which is ready for testing. The file you'll want to pay attention to is: README.OBJECTS as that describes the mechanics of actually implementing a driver in userspace. Another interresting spot to look is tests/globals.phpt which includes a simple, yet functional userspace driver for accessing variable contents as database resources.

I don't expect it to work perfect right out of the box, but it should get the job done. Please Report Bugs when you find them so I can get 'em fixed.