Re: A big project

Hello,

on 09/15/2005 03:09 PM Mike Novecento said the following:
> My aim is SPEED OF DEVELOPMENT, LOW TIME TO LEARN THE TECHNOLOGY and
> APPLICATION STRENGHT (to security and to scalability issues).

If your project is Web based, with PHP your are on the right track.

If your project is big and you do not have much time, you need to use
powerful tools that let you go from design to implementation is a short
period.

My recommendation is for you to take a look at mature code generation
tools for repetitive tasks. The reason for this recommendation is that
with mature code generation tools you can drastically minimize the time
you take to write, test and debug your project.

There are code generation tools for many purposes. For instance, after
you model the classes of data objects for instance using UML tools, you
can implement such classes manually using well known design patterns
like factory and DAO. That will work but since it is a repetitive task,
you will take a lot of time to write, test and debug your hand coded
classes.

Code generation based alternative for generating data object classes,
can avoid most of those problems as you just need to specify your class
design and have the code generator tool produce the code for you
according to your tastes.

Metastorage is one tool like this that I have been using for 3 years now
with great benefits to address exactly what you mentioned: speed of
development.

There would be a lot to say about this, but for now you may find more
about Metastorage here:

http://www.meta-language.net/metastorage.html

There are some screenshots of Metastorage Web interface here:

http://www.meta-language.net/screenshots.html

You may also find a tutorial here to get you started quickly:

http://www.meta-language.net/metastorage-tutorial.html

-- 
Regards,
Manuel Lemos
PHP Classes - Free ready to use OOP components written in PHP
http://www.phpclasses.org/
PHP Reviews - Reviews of PHP books and other products
http://www.phpclasses.org/reviews/
Metastorage - Data object relational mapping layer generator
http://www.meta-language.net/metastorage.html