New project underway
Submitted by Mike Youmans, Owner of ATSites.net on 11/18/2008 at 11:43:46 am.

We at ATSites are working on a self-funded project that could prove to be quite interesting and certainly very helpful. Let me preface this by saying that we at ATSites have no partnership nor affiliation with any other software provider or development firm.

Now that the disclaimer is out of the way, let me pose a question - Have you ever needed a database but not had access to one? For instance, you are in a corporate environment that doesn't allow usage of external MySQL databases and only uses Oracle for in-house apps. Or perhaps you want to build a self-contained, portable web app that needs the flexibility of a SQL database but that can move with the app. In these cases, you may consider a flat-file database.

Flat-file databases are pretty much what they sound like: databases that are actually files written in a certain way to mimic the behavior of SQL databases. There are several different offerings out there to choose from each with its pros and cons. This blog is not an analysis of these offerings (but perhaps I should do that in the future) but rather an explanation of what we are building and why it was needed.

We ran into a situation like one of the examples above and were relegated to using a flat-file database for a web application. After an exhaustive search, we settled on Gladius DB. Gladius DB is an open source product built in php with syntax similar to MySQL. The implementation was pretty simple and usage can be API-style or function based. The documentation leaves a bit to be desired (the author admits that was due to laziness!) but it was enough to make it quickly usable.

Now to the point. While Gladius DB was easy to implement and pretty easy to use, it lacked a user interface. Anyone who has used MySQL knows that a product called phpMyAdmin can be used as the user interface to allow a developer to perform functions on the database without writing custom scripts for every little thing. We decided that a similar product would be helpful in dealing with these types of databases both during our development project and to others when using this particular system.

Laughingly, we have given this project a Beta working title of phpMyGladmin and you can check out the progress or even test drive the application by visiting our projects page at http://atsites.net/portal/projects and click on phpMyGladmin.

We hope you find it useful. Until next time, take care.