From: Ken Guest > On Wed, Oct 27, 2010 at 5:27 PM, <mmestnik@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote: >> Recently we had a discussion about weather our code should be configured >> using files or a DB back-end. As this topic effects nearly every >> development team I was wondering if there shouldn't be a common library >> that deals with all of these issues. >> >> We came to the conclusion that either should work, but our project must >> work on systems that would not have an SQLDB installed. There fore it >> must be configured using files as supporting both would be a waste of >> our development time. >> >> Looking around for a solution I came across an extension to getopt that >> read command line parameters from a file, essentially emulating "exec >> $(cat);". As this did allow configuration from either the command line >> or a file it's a good start. However we are specificually looking for >> something that would accept configuration from a file or a DB, command >> line options are not important. Though a great solution would take >> configuration from anywhere. >> >> A full featured solution would also support containing user preferences >> and administrative settings. Allowing any of these to come from almost >> anywhere. Here is how an example deployment might work. As this would >> be a programming tool the user would be an administrator installing and >> configuring the software. >> >> Some configuration information contained in php should be extensible so >> that all the configuration could be done there. In this case settings >> and user preferences would be read-only, configuration information is >> always read-only. This would usually specify a config file to be >> located in the same folder or a subfolder. >> >> This configuration file would have a default format that is configurable >> in the php. Would be one of PHP, XML, bind, apache, and several other >> config file formats. This file would contain information on where >> settings and preferences could be written to, either another >> configuration file some where in /var or connection information for a DB. >> >> From an application developers stand point this should all be as >> difficult as getopt to setup, design decisions like what format the >> config file is in should be left up to the admin installing the >> software. The developer need only be concerned with defining the values >> stored, there type, and other properties. >> >> Does anything like this exist? This seams like an essential piece of >> code that is re-invented for every project. >> > > PEAR's Config package sounds like a good match for what you are looking for. > It parses and outputs various formats and edits existing config files > > http://pear.php.net/package/Config > > There's a brief intro to what it can do at > http://pear.php.net/manual/en/package.configuration.config.intro.php > > I have to admit I am somewhat biased as I'm currently on the PEAR Group > (read 'committee') - but I'd be surprised if there's not a Zend or > ezComponents/zetaComponents equivalent. I also have to admit there are some > outstanding issues that need to be addressed for PEAR's Config package - the > good news is someone has volunteered to resolve these today. There are nearly as many ways to do this as there are languages to implement them in. I have been using YAML files for a while now, not only for configuration and parameter storage, but also input for data driven testing, for both unit and functional tests. Other teams here are using JSON strings, which will actually become a proper subset of YAML when the parsers catch up with the latest specification. More info at <http://yaml.org/>. Bob McConnell -- PHP General Mailing List (http://www.php.net/) To unsubscribe, visit: http://www.php.net/unsub.php
