updates and design patterns

First, updates on our house….we’ve found that we have a tentative closing date of ⁸⁄₃₁. This is good because we need to be out of our current place by ⁹⁄₁. This means that my web page/blog may be down for a while while we’re in the process of getting the cable hooked up at the new place and getting my server unpacked.

Next, I was tasked with designing a web-based tool(PHP/MySQL) to manage special configuration files for games at work. Sepecifically, we wanted the ability to issue a user a file that contained a unique key such that should we need to audit who had which file, we could easily determine this information. I modeled the data and ended up with 5 or 6 tables. Nothing too fancy. I then story-boarded the entire tool. I ended up with about 8 or 9 different screens. I then began to write code. I was integrating this into an existing tool framework, so I didn’t need to worry about authentication as that was already covered by the framework.

Early on, I decided to try something a bit different that I normally don’t use…. I decided that I wanted to try using the Data Access Object (DAO) design pattern. After implementing the tool using this pattern, I really see the usefulness of it. It kept most of my code divided into two sections: the business logic and the database access layer. This will make it easy to change the DB access layer should we change DBMS….which is a good thing because we’re looking to move from MySQL to Oracle for this particular set of tools. Now, I don’t think that I will always use this methodology for building sites/tools, but in this particular case it made coding the tool very easy.