Welcome to the PADDA Project

What is the PADDA?

PADDA is a tool to make developing web applications with PHP really quick and relatively easy. PADDA is also the afrikaans name for frog. We know we have chosen a slippery goal for this project, but if you get to know the PADDA, you will soon be leaping ahead of the competition!

What are the main features of PADDA?

Padda consists of three core classes that provide the functionality to abstract database access and template your site (see classdocs lower down on this page). Currently the main features include:

• Abstraction of Postgres, MySQL and MS SQL 7 (via freeTDS) database backends.
• Very good performance when browsing a database as most transactions are queries for a tuple pair. We have found that we were able to deliver subsecond response time with very large datasets (about 1.4 million recs).
• NavBar widget and Navigate method automatically handle recordset navigation (first, previous next, last, new, save and delete functions).
• Form template system allows databound controls to be generated with a single line of code each, providing picklists (combo's) and other form elements that are bound to the currently active record.
• User authentication using http headers and a data driven user database.
• Themeability using style sheets.
• DHTML menu for site navigation using a menu system that is data driven and autogenerated for each application.The DHTML menu navigation generates javascript arrays suitable for use with the HEIRMENU DHTML menu system.
• Open ended design to allow other protocols to be implemented in the future (e.g. WAP, cHTML).

What is the current status of PADDA? / How can you help?

PADDA is a work in progress. PADDA should work with most recent browsers and has been tested with IE 5.5, Mozilla 0.9. Support for Konqueror is nearly there - pending the resolution of a small bug in the HEIRMENU implementation. In terms of documentation, the classes are well documented, and the installation process has recently been documented. Tutorial type documentation for the templating process is still in the works, but looking at the PADDA control application should get you started. We are looking for developers to assist with a) cross browser compatibility and b) implementing support for other database backends c) developing new widgets.

Who wrote PADDA?

PADDA is the brainchild of Tim Sutton and Andrew Turner. We like PHP, but it has one well known limitation: the database API is not consistent accross the various supported database backends. Although projects such as PHP PEAR do address this, our twinned tuple type recordset navigation set is a very efficient way to provide record level access to a dataset. We use MySQL, PostgresQL and MS SQL Server 7.0 for our backend stuff, so it will come as no surprise that that is what we are trying to get hooked up to first.

Where is the PADDA?

The padda is hosted on Sourceforge. If you are interested in participating in the development of , I would suggest paying a visit to our sourceforge project page where all the work is happening.

PADDA Demonstration App

There is a small demonstration application hosted on this site. When prompted, you will need to use the following (case sensitive):

Username: Admin
Password: password

If you just want to get a quick idea of what it is like, take a look at this screenshot.

PADDA Source Code

The source code for PADDA and the sample application (PHPTasker) are publicly available. Included in the sources is the PHPTasker application which you can use to see how PADDA is used. If you are using mySQL for your backend, you should use the separate .sql file provided for mySQL to create your backend (this also installs the backend for the sample application). The PHPTasker application is currently NOT implemented under Postgres (although it would be trivial to do so). I will upload detailed installation instructions soon, but if you are the curious type, they are there for you to have a look at so long. The latest (non-stable) version is available via CVS.

PADDA documentation

The PADDA classes are fully commented according to the PHPdoc standard, and the generated class documentation is available online as well as being included in the source package. At some stage in the future I plan to write a tutorial for PADDA, but in the meantime, I would suggest you look at the PADDA sources' index.php and padda/templates directories to see how the various features of padda are implemented.

Tim & Andrew