Current Project

Background

For a long time, I had been using Microsoft Excel to manage my quarterly GST filing to the Canada Revenue Agency. To facilitate my GST preparation, I created an MS Access database that contained custom data entry forms, calculation logic in VBA (Visual Basic For Applications) code and custom reports. Life suddenly became much easier around GST filing time. However, to keep my web development skills sharp, I decided to research PHP frameworks, select a suitable framework, and convert the MS Access application to PHP and MySQL.

Software Development Environment

The IDE (Integrated Development Environment) I used for this effort was NetBeans. I installed the XAMPP package, which contains the Apache Web server, the PHP scripting language and the MySQL relational database engine on my Windows laptop computer. I wanted the Windows development environment to mirror as closely as possible my Linux-based production environment.

PHP Development Frameworks

I looked at a wide variety of development frameworks for PHP, among them in no particular order CodeIgniter, Yii, CakePHP, Prado (interesting, given my familiarity with the .NET environment and Prado's similarity to that environment), Symfony and others. I found that most environments were poorly documented, or were overly complex (at least for my needs). I finally settled on a framework that greatly facilitated my development efforts without getting in the way. Its name: "Simple PHP Framework". Oddly, this framework was undocumented but was very easy to understand. The framework is available at this site. If I had to pick a "bigger" framework with more bells and whistles, Yii would probably be my choice.

Demo

Click here to see a demonstration version of this application. I will be creating additional fictitious data as soon as possible since the guest account does not have update privileges.

Sample Code

This article is a work in progress. Stay tuned.

Last updated April 12, 2010 8:33:06 AM