8 June 07
FSql - part of FFD 3
After spending a long time designing and developing the SQL parser for FFD 3 (which should be completed by the end of this month) I figured that other people could probably make use the sql parser for their various projects. So what I’ve done is seperated the third version of FFD into two packages: the main data storage routines which manage the tables, retrieve rows, get table info etc. and a sql parser which I am calling ‘FSql’ (sql for flat files). I’ll be releasing FSql on its own as well as in the FFD package so anyone can implement their own data storage routines or just add sql support to their existing implementation, despite its complexity.
As you would expect the sql parser works with a subset of sql, though notice that it’s designed to be compliant with mysql, and so may break standards if mysql does so. Since it obviously doesn’t have a full understanding of sql the parser is quite acceptive and if it doesn’t understand something it just ignores it, it doesn’t fire up hundreds of errors telling you that it doesn’t recognise a specific statement, when it might be perfectly correct. By default the parser returns an empty object just containing the data such as the query type, the tables it affects etc. However, you can define your own structures for returning the results of queries, to make FSql return the query data in an array or to change the names of the parser return values.
I’m hoping that by releasing the parser seperately many other developers will be able to make use of it and, as I said before, power up their own websites and php projects with sql support.