php and me don't get alone... help?

[CLIFFORD ILKAY]

On Thursday 30 November 2006 11:59, Madison Kelly wrote:
> I have no idea why, but it started working... I wish I could point
> to why. This really doesn't endear me to PHP. Why are all the good
> BBS forums written in PHP? *sigh*.

You shouldn't confuse popular with good. phpBB is one of the most 
popular BBS forums out there but I know from personal experience 
helping hosting customers recover from hacked servers or defaced web 
sites, and from what a friend who provides tech support for another 
hosting company tells me, that it is also one of the more common ways 
that servers are hacked.

As for your PHP to PostgreSQL connectivity issues, I've never had to 
compile PHP, Apache, or PostgreSQL from source to get the three of 
them working together. For example, I had tried PostgreSQL with 
Drupal some months ago. It was a simple matter of installing the RPMs 
and it Just Worked. However, I found the claim that Drupal supports 
PostgreSQL to be questionable. The core Drupal distribution supports 
PostgreSQL so no problem there but PostgreSQL support for many of the 
modules that are available for download from drupal.org is 
non-existent. I can't imagine using Drupal without add-on modules so 
to me, that means Drupal really doesn't support PostgreSQL. A module 
author apparently has to do different things to support different 
databases. Most don't bother. I don't know (or care) enough about 
Drupal's workings to explain why they chose this approach as opposed 
to the one taken by say, Django <http://djangoproject.com>, where 
supporting MySQL or PostgreSQL is a matter of changing a couple of 
parameters in a configuration file.

Incidentally, I'm not suggesting that Drupal and Django are the same 
thing but rather commenting on the different approaches taken to 
abstracting the underlying databases. Django uses an ORM (Object 
Relational Mapper) while Drupal uses PHP's various SQL functions to 
interact with the underlying database. I know PHP has various ways of 
abstracting the underlying database so that one can write portable 
code but I have no idea why that approach isn't used by Drupal.
-- 
Regards,

Clifford Ilkay
Dinamis Corporation
3266 Yonge Street, Suite 1419
Toronto, ON
Canada  M4N 3P6

+1 416-410-3326
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