Hello, Finally I made time to release a full blown application based on MetaL compiler persistence module. Here is the release announcement that may also be found on the site: http://www.meta-language.net/news-2002-12-05-metastorage.html _________________________________________________________________ Released Metastorage generator Manuel Lemos, 2002-12-05 16:11:44 GMT Metastorage is an application that is capable of generating persistence layer APIs. It takes a component definition defined in the Component Persistence Markup Language (CPML), a XML based format, and generates classes and storage schemas in a given target programming language. Using CPML, developers can focus their efforts on the modeling of data structures that hold the information and the relationships between the entities that their applications deal with. Metastorage takes care of generating all the necessary code to store and retrieve such data structures from persistent storage containers like relational databases. The main goal of Metastorage is to drastically reduce the time to develop applications that traditionally use on SQL based relational databases. The generated APIs consist of a sets of classes that provide an Object Oriented interface to the objects of the classes modeled using CPML. The generated APIs are also capable of installing the data schema in the persistence container, which in the case of a relational database is the set of tables that will hold the persistent objects. This completely eliminates the need to write any SQL queries manually. CPML is independent of the type of persistent container. This means that while it can be used to model classes of persistent objects that may be stored in relational databases, such objects may as well be stored in other types of persistence containers. For instance, if an application needs to move a directory of objects with user information from a relational database to a LDAP server to increase the application scalability, the same CPML component definition would be used. Metastorage would then generate classes objects that implement the same API for interfacing with a LDAP server that is compatible with the API generated to interface with relational databases. This make the migration process easier and with reduced risks. Another possible benefit of the persistence container independence of the APIs generated by Metastorage, is the case where an application may need to run in environments where a SQL based database server is not available. In that case the same API could be generated to store persistent objects in flat file databases or plain XML files. For now, the current version of Metastorage only supports the generation of PHP code based on the database independent Metabase API. This means that it may also interface with PEAR::MDB database abstraction layer using its built-in Metabase API wrapper. In consequence, many types of relational databases are already supported. Since this is the first release of Metastorage, there is plenty of room for improvement in the possibilities of the generated persistence APIs and the level of optimization of the generated code. In the future it will be supported other languages besides PHP, other database APIs besides Metabase and other persistence containers besides relational databases. Metastorage is based on MetaL compiler persistence module. Like MetaL, Metastorage is Open Source and is distributed with BSD like software license. Downloadable archives and documentation with an example of component definition are available from the MetaL site. -- Regards, Manuel Lemos -- PHP Database Mailing List (http://www.php.net/) To unsubscribe, visit: http://www.php.net/unsub.php
