About Nennius - MySQL

As a Web programmer myself, I have noticed a pattern in many of the data management systems I’ve developed. Although the types of data vary widely, the basic methods of manipulating that data remain the same. Most data management tools must allow for the creation, modification, and deletion of records. In addition most must also allow for an easy mechanism with which to search and sort the existing records. And so on.

As with many other fields, there is no reason to re-invent the wheel when it comes to programming. So several months ago I began development on an open source data management engine, written in PHP, geared towards automating the development of data management applications. This engine, dubbed “Nennius,” uses a set of library classes to handle everything from creation and manipulation of SQL records, to searching and sorting records, to user authentication and restricted record access, and so forth.

The tool itself, along with example applications written for it, has been released on Source Forge (http://nennius.sourceforge.net) under the Apache 2 open source license and is available for free download and customization. By using Nennius, Web developers are able to create comprehensive data management applications in a very short time, simply by configuring the applications to work with their pre-existing data structures.

Nennius also allows for more than one application to be run simultaneously off of a single instance of the engine. (This is similar in some respects to Jakarta Tomcat.) Because of this, Nennius applications generally take up a small amount of disk space.

We will now take a look at the basic Nennius layout.