Re: [PDO] PHP ext/PDO future

Hi,

I hope everybody was just busy with other stuff over the weekend (like  
it should be) and now that the east coast people should be waking up,  
we will hopefully start to have some sort of a discussion.

At any rate it seems that Kellen is no longer working on the IBM PDO  
extensions, so I replaced his email with [email protected], which is  
the general team at IBM that is tasked with maintaing their PDO  
extensions now it seems (hopefully we will soon get a personal  
introduction by one of them).

Due to the changed email address, I have included the entire original  
email again and please reply to this second email and not to the  
first. Also please keep the entire CC list intact for now until we can  
be confident that all relevant and interested people have subscribed  
to this list.

regards,
Lukas

On 30.08.2008, at 13:31, Lukas Kahwe Smith wrote:

> Hello All,
>
> I am sure I have asked each of you at some point if you are  
> interested in helping out to bring PDO to the next level. The people  
> that I have not asked are included because they currently actively  
> maintain some PHP RDBMS extension (let me know if I missed anyone).  
> I am also including the PDO list because I hope that in case I  
> missed someone they are subscribed to this list. The current state  
> is that there nobody actively maintaining the core package. Most of  
> the drivers are more or less orphaned as well. Some well known RDBMS  
> do not even have a driver at this stage. Also most drivers behave  
> quite different, even if there is no technical reason for them todo  
> so, aside from the fact that there is no easy way to validate how  
> each driver behaves.
>
> The goal of PDO is obviously to make it easy for developers to write  
> applications that can run on top of any RDBMS. Well at least the  
> client side API should be the same and the most common issues with  
> SQL portability (quoting, prepared statements, LOBs, error handling  
> etc.) should also be somewhat addressed. I know many people would  
> like to expand the scope much further (thinking of a PDBC along the  
> lines of JDBC). I do not want to shoot down such visions, but I  
> think even if we are to go in that direction, we should take a few  
> intermediate steps beforehand.
>
> I tried to compile a list of the current main gripes [1], but the  
> biggest one is the lack of an extensive test suite. With a test  
> suite we could introduce a compatibility mode, where the differences  
> between drivers are reduced. At the very least it would make it  
> possible to document where the drivers are different.
>
> The good news is that SUN/MySQL has already started to write a ton  
> of tests during the development of their update to PDO_MySQL [2].  
> However these tests obviously assume the default behavior of MySQL.  
> This could be a good basis to build upon. Of course that is not to  
> say that we need to accept the MySQL default behavior as the way  
> things should work in compatibility mode. We can discuss what  
> behavior is most easily implementable across as many drivers as  
> possible. Obviously such discussions pose the risk that each vendor  
> or a set of vendors prefer one way and others another. I hope we can  
> resolve these issues in a cooperative fashion. I would rather not  
> have to spend time on finding complex decision making processes to  
> handle such disagreements.
>
> Anyways, the time is now imho. We never had so many vendors and  
> single developers around that are interested in writing and  
> maintaining RDBMS related PHP extensions and that have shown their  
> face in the community in one form or another. Also I have  
> increasingly gotten the vibe from vendors that they can in fact live  
> without a CLA. So with this effort the common PHP development model  
> will be the baseline. If you have questions about the legal aspects  
> of the PHP development let me know, but please please please do not  
> sabotage this discussion by trying to introduce new legal aspects. I  
> am very sure that we are enough people to make a difference, even if  
> one vendor in the end has to step back from active development  
> because of legal reasons. I sure hope this will not be the case, but  
> if it does turn out to be the case, we can try to find a solution  
> independent of the big effort (maybe someone in the community will  
> step up to fill the gap etc.)
>
> So as a first step, I ask anyone truly interested to waive their  
> hands. As a first task I then ask everybody to check out the tests  
> that SUN/MySQL wrote [2] and/or make available any further tests  
> that exist in private branches you all might have for the  
> maintenance of PDO drivers. The test results against different RDBMS  
> will hopefully give us a baseline to see where we stand today. I  
> will then probably try to organize the results on the PHP.net wiki  
> and we can continue from there.
>
> regards,
> Lukas Kahwe Smith
> [email protected]
>
> [1] http://wiki.php.net/rfc/pdov1
> [2] http://blog.ulf-wendel.de/?p=188
>
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>

Lukas Kahwe Smith
[email protected]