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This article is what I hope will be the first in a series about my favorite way to develop web applications, the Zend Framework. I’m not going to try and sell the framework to you, I’m going to assume you already know all about it and that’s how you got here.

The Zend_Db_Table class provides a powerful and easy-to-use way of abstracting your data model into PHP objects. One problem I recently encountered was that the design of the class assumes you’re only going to use one database, which may not be the case.

Let’s assume you’ve got a Zend application that follows the de facto standard laid out in this tutorial. You’d have something in your application/config.ini file that looked like this:

Then in your index.php bootstrapper, you’d have something like this:

In the above example, we set all the database parameters in the config.ini file. We load these values into dbAdapter and decalre that adapter as the default via the setDefaultAdapter method of Zend_Db_Table. Any classes derived from Zend_Db_Table abstract will use this database parameter. This works fine for one database, but what if we’ve got more than one? We can’t really use the default adapter anymore, at least not in the usual way.

One way to get around this problem is to create an array of adapters and make the key of the array the name of the database. We can then implement an application specific table class that will allow us to easily choose the adapter we want to use. We can then have our application table classes extend that.

For this example, let’s say we’re building a site to sell textbooks, and there’s two databases: library and order_system

Your config.ini would now look something like this:

The in your index.php bootstrapper, you would do something more like the following:

All we’re doing here is creating an array of adapters instead of just one. If we set the parameter “default” on one of them to true, that will become our default database. This will save you a bit of typing later if have one database that you’ll use most often and one or more other ones you use less.

Then we create a new class, called App_Db_Table_Abstract. You can put this in /application/models folder, but I like to create a folder called /application/lib for my abstract classes. Either way, just make sure it ends up in your include path.

All we’re doing here is looking for a class property called “$_use_adapter”. If that’s set (in our derived classes) then we’ll look for that dbAdapter in the registry. If not, we’ll use whatever the default is set to.

Here’s an example of a derived class that would do this. It uses the “orders” table in the “order_system” database.

Now this class will use the correct adapater instead of the default. That’s all there is to it!

This method of implementation is nice because you could have one database, two databases or a hundred databases and the only thing you’d need to do would be to add additional sections to the config.ini file.

Ever read a book that was a few hundred pages longer than it needed to be? Well, a controversial new site called (aptly) lazylibrary might be just what you’ve always wanted. It searches online book vendors and returns only results that come in under 200 pages.

While this may seem a bit simplistic, I think that for non-fiction at least, it’s a pretty good way of culling out works that were clearly the result of authors being paid by page count, which is probably how most technical books get written. I can’t tell you the number of 700 page programming books I have purchased in my life from which I have needed about thirty pages. Most of the technical books I’ve really utilized most of tend to be on the shorter side anyway.

But hey, why not use this for fiction? Taking a week-long business trip involving air travel? A sub-200 page book might be perfect! You’re not looking for a nine course literary feast, you’re just looking for “literary snacks“!

Interestingly, it seems to be getting a fair amount of press, including one early award. It would seem, however, that wordy authors and people who like them don’t like being put on notice.