Josh Adell has written up a new post for his blog showing some of his experience connecting PHP to Neo4j, a graph database (and open source project). It helps to solve a problem of related datasets and the difficulties that traditional RDBMS have with them.

Lately, I've been playing around with the graph database Neo4j and its application to certain classes of problems. Graph databases are meant to solve problems in domains where data relationships can be multiple levels deep. [...] As you continue to add degrees, the query becomes increasingly unwieldy, harder to maintain, and less performant.

Graph databases, like Neo4j, handle these sorts of needs perfectly. There wasn't an official PHP interface for it, so he decided to create his own that worked with the REST interface the database provides. He includes a few code snippets showing how to connect and make a few requests - setting properties on objects, relating objects to one another and making queries that follow the paths from user to user and return them as a simple array.

Cal Evans has posted the eighth tip in his six-tip series (but who's counting) about how a client can coordinate better with a developer and make a better relationship for the project. In this new tip, he suggests that the client "own it".

No, I'm not talking about own it as in Point 7 - "Do your part", I mean make sure that at the end of the project, you own the project, not your developer.

He mentions two of the aspects you, the client, will need to worry about once the last line of bug free code has been committed and delivered. Be sure that you own the domain name for the project and have a clear understanding of any intellectual property concerns that might come up (what codebase is it built on, who owns the code - client or developer, etc).

Doctrine allows you to set up relationships to link data in various tables together. Unfortunately, those aren't always in the order they need to be in. In a new post to his blog Chris Hartjes shows you how to sort these relationship results just by adding a simple line to your request.

I started digging around via search engine. Took me about an hour to find the solution. First, it took me half the time to dive deep enough to find out WHERE I can define the default sort order. Surprisingly, it was in an area that made total sense but I could not find before.

You can see an example of it in the "hasMany" call in his code snippet - the addition of the "orderBy" option and the value showing the sorting order. Here's the StackOverflow page that gave him the answer he needed.

Michelangelo van Dam has a recent post to his blog about a difficulty he was having with his Zend Framework application and setting up some data models.

I was struggling getting my data models (as described in the Zend Framework Quickstart) to work with relations. My first solution was to create a database view that merged that data using joins to collect this data in a format that I could use in my data models. This was going great until I looked at my database where it contained over 20 views (along with 20 data models, mappers and db table gateways) ! So I said to myself there had to be another way.

His other way came in the form of the Zend_Db_Table_Relationships component and, after a bit of work, it did just what he needed. He shares how you can set them up similarly by walking you through the creation of a sample application ("datamodels") and linking together a series of sample tables with a Db_Table class using relationships, a simple model to abstract data access and a model mapper class to redefine some of the based functions (like "findAll") to pull in data from other tables.

Paul Jones has added a new post to his blog today (in response to this one from Michelangelo van Dam about models in Zend Framework) on how to work with models in the Solar Framework and how the experience compares.

I read the article, and wondered how hard it would be to replicate his narrative using the Solar Framework model system. Turns out it's pretty easy: there's a lot of work that Solar does for you.

He describes the process in a series of ten steps with most of them being done for you by the tools included with the framework (the ones that aren't just setup tasks). The "solar system" toolkit includes a command line application that helps you build out the models and relating them is as easy as changing some values in the model classes with methods like "hasOne" and "belongsTo".

PHP is always thought of as an open source free spirit that survives on the work that's done by the community around it. While there's no denying the massive amounts of work done by developers of the language, there's also another group that is doing their part to help the language flourish - commercial entities. Scott MacVicar takes a look at a few of them in this new post to his blog.

I thought I'd start with a quick thank you to all those groups and entities involved indirectly with PHP. The PHP project relies on donations to provide our service infrastructure, this is in the form of hardware and hosting from both individual companies and hosting companies to provide collocation.

Besides the hardware support there's also companies willing to allow their employees time to work on the project (such as Pierre from Microsoft). Other companies that have made large contributions include IBM's large amount of testing, Sun's work to improve PHP on Solaris and, of course, Zend's support of the project and the time its employees spend developing the language.

On the Debuggable blog Tim Koschutzki has a new post showing how to get CakePHP to play nicely with a HABTM query and pagination.

The problem is that a user inputs some search criteria into a form, the resultset exceeds 30 rows for example and the user must be able to browse through the resultset via different pages. [...] This problem itself is in fact not much of a problem. We just need to store the form conditions somewhere and then hack it together. So what we are going to do is that we raise the difficulty bar a lot more by trying to get the pagination work over a HABTM relation.

Code is included for the model and controller to get the job done.

In a fourth part of their series looking at using Doctrine in PHP, the ProDevTips blog moves on to implementing it in a typical CRUD interface.

They create the links between the tables (two hasOne relationships), a search() method to find the destinations for a user, a sorting method to multisort based on the subkeys of the value passed in and the methods for updating the information already in the database.

That's it for now, feel free to download this tiny Smarty and Doctrine framework. Note that for this to work you have to put Smarty and Doctrine in the lib folder. There is a login interface involved, just click submit there without entering anything. There is also an SQL file in the trip_selector folder if you want to try this out with some test data (same as in the picture above).

Lee Blue has posted a handy tip for users of the Zend Framework, specifically when sorting the results from a query to tables linked in a Zend_Db_Table setup.

So you figured out how to define the relationships between your Zend_Db_Tables and you have issued a call to findDependentRowset(). You get your Rowset back but you need to sort the results by one of the columns in the dependent table. How do you do that?

Unfortunately, he's found out that you just simply can't - well, not without a custom function (until the 1.5 release of the framework rolls around). He shows his table set up and some sample database classes to relate to the tables (and link between them). The magic comes in with his DU_Utils class that takes in the data and sorts it based on the given column name in the given direction.

Chris Hartjes has posted a mini-tutorial on working with HABTM (Has And Belongs To Many) relationships in a CakePHP applications alongside pagination.

There are usually lots of Has And Belongs To Many relationship questions on the CakePHP mailing list. Since I am stupid about this stuff, I sought out Nate Abele and bugged him via IM until he agreed to give me an example of how to do this.

He includes both the how and the why, explaining that merging the parameters allows the script to apply the HABTM connections as well as limiting the results for each page.