Metastorage 2006.11.22 review

Metastorage is a PHP data access object generator compiler tool. Metastorage is an application that automatically generates code f

License: BSD License File size: 1051K Developer: Manuel Lemos

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Metastorage is a PHP data access object generator compiler tool.

Metastorage is an application that automatically generates code for an Object Oriented API to store, retrieve and manipulate the persistent objects of classes described in a high level data model definition.

Metastorage provides a much more efficient development process for medium or large size applications that store and retrieve data from SQL based databases or other types of storage persistence containers, like XML files, flat file databases or LDAP servers.

When storing objects in SQL databases, Metastorage generated code performs efficient object-relational mapping. Metastorage antecipates static storage optimization decisions at compile time, so applications gain in performance, code size and memory usage by avoiding evaluating static decisions at run time.

Here are some key features of "Metastorage":
XML definition format

Easy to write and understand component definition format in XML

Database schemas

Automatic generation of (database) schema definition of the persistence container

Automatic generation of all classes

Generates all the code for the data classes, factory class and (database) schema installation class

Self-contained code

The generated code is self-contained and does not depend on MetaL or libraries of code that are not supplied

Object Query Language

Provides an Object Query Language (OQL) to define expressions to filter objects in search queries

No SQL

All code is generated without the need for the developer to write SQL code manually

Forms

Generation of classes to create, validate and process Web forms to manage objects of the data classes.

Reports

Generation of classes to execute queries to retrieve data from many objects to elaborate reports or to execute another kind of bulk processing

UML Diagrams

Automatic generation of Entity-Relationship graphs in UML of the component class diagram

Requirements:
Metastorage is an application of the MetaL compiler engine. This engine is totally written in PHP.

The MetaL engine requires PHP 3 or later to run. The code generated by Metastorage requires PHP 4 or later to run. Any platform on which PHP 4 is supported can run Metastorage and the generated code, including: Linux, Windows, Mac OS X, Solaris, etc..

Metastorage can be run either from the command line (shell/DOS) or using Webstorage - the Web interface (recommended). Webstorage requires a Web server supported by PHP, including Apache, Microsoft IIS, Netscape Server, etc.

What's New in This Release:
This release introduces the possibility to group rows of report query results, similar to using the SQL GROUP BY clause.
The Object Query Language was enhanced to support constant expressions relative to the current date and time of when the queries are executed.
The algorithm of computing the path of parsed XML files was changed to avoid exceeding the length of Windows file systems path limits.
The reports now support columns with boolean type expression values.