announcing prosper

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I've been talking and teasing and hinting about my side project. Well today is the day I can finally announce my project, prosper.

Prosper has been in the works for a few months in my spare time, it is a database abstraction layer written in php. For anyone who has ever written a web application in php you know that they are written for one database and one database only. It is a MySQL application or an Oracle application or an X application. If the application gets popular enough, the developer might get around to adding some support for other backends, and when they do it is always some homegrown solution. With prosper you can write your database code once and have it work across 18 different backend databases.

Prosper came about when I was looking for a quality ORM layer, the one thing that struck me as odd is that everyone was rolling their own database abstraction layer. Doctrine has DQL, Flourish has F-SQL, php.activerecord has an adapter architecture, and so each library has its own quirks and compatibility.

Following the Unix philosophy, prosper does one thing and tries to do it well. Here are some things that prosper is not. Prosper is not an ORM. Prosper is not an Active Record implementation. Prosper is not an MVC framework. Prosper will not pluralize names, will not handle sequences for Oracle, will not slice and dice your onions. Prosper is one thing and one thing only, a library that turns function calls into sql.

Official documentation is coming soon, but for now you can view the case study, learn why you should use proper, and get the code

I read the documentation, I wrote the code, now its your turn. Give it a try, submit issues to the Google Code Page, and let me know what a great / terrible job I did.

Note that prosper is not ready for primetime yet, this is version 0.5, lots of the backends should work but only the MySQL one has gotten any kind of real testing. The code is open source currently under an MIT License, although the license may change for the 1.0 release, it will always be free to use and open source though. Here is the list of things that still need to happen.

• Thoroughly test the backends


• Add any backends that I missed


• Write up official documentation


• Move code to github to facilitate collaboration


• Forge partnerships with other open source projects


• Shamelessly promote

Go get the code and let me know what else I need to get to work on.