Basis

Basis is a simple way to organize and validate data in a PHP web app.

I constantly notice a common problem in PHP apps. When you work with data from a database (ie: Memcache, MySQL, Membase, HBase, etc...), you have to write a lot of code to validate it when you first read it, and ensure that you don't accidentally corrupt it when you modify and write it.

For example, I often find bugs that started because some code expects some key in a memcache blob to be a list, when it was stored as a dictionary, with keys as strings. Usually, these sorts of bugs are tedious and time consuming to find in even medium sized codebases.

Basis is inspired by two Ruby projects that are solving a similar problem for Ruby apps:

• https://github.com/newtoy/toystore (good explanatory article (here)[http://railstips.org/blog/archives/2011/01/27/data-modeling-in-performant-systems/])
• https://github.com/wycats/moneta

Goals

Here are Basis's goals:

1. Stay focused: this list should be short.
2. Represent data: Basis is about representing your data. It should be a great way to represent anything you need to store in your web app.
3. Keep it simple: A smart PHP developer should be able to implement a data model by writing down the field names and their types and no more.
4. Don't discriminate: A developer should be able to use whatever datastore they want, and store their data with whatever serialization they want.

Getting Started

All you need to do to get started is download Basis, extract it, and put it somewhere where you can require_once('basis/Basis.php') in PHP.

Example

<?php
require_once 'basis/Basis.php';
class User extends Basis_Base
{
    public function properties()
    {
        return array(
            'firstName' => new Basis_Type_String(),
            'lastName' => new Basis_Type_String(),
        );
    }
}

//create a new memcache connection
$mc = new Memcache;
$u = User::decode($mc->get($user_id));

//print out who we are
echo "Hello! I am " . $u->firstName() . " " . $u->lastName();

//change our identity
$u->firstName("John");
$u->lastName("Doe");

//save our new identity forever
$mc->set($u->encode());