Configuration Manipulation With PHP Config (
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Tired of writing (and rewriting) code to manage your application's configuration variables? Take a look at the PEAR Config class, a PHP toolkit designed specifically for manipulating configuration files and the data within them. This article demonstrates using the Config class to read and write configuration files in XML, PHP and INI formats, and use built-in methods to easily build Web-based application configuration modules.One of the most important tasks when building software applications is gaining a
clear understanding of which parts of the application can be configured by the
user, and which parts cannot. For example, if you're building a generic tool to
administer databases, you would obviously want the DBA to be able to configure
the application for different databases by inputting the database names and
access parameters for each. However, you might not want to give the DBA control
over other aspects of the application - for example, the protocol version used
for communication with the RDBMS, or the method of RDBMS file access - as these
would be internal to your code and also perhaps too complex for user-level
configuration.
Although making such decisions might appear trivial and largely a matter of
common sense, they are no small task, especially for complex applications -
deciding which aspects of your software are configurable by the user is
something that requires a thorough understanding of both the software's goals
and the end-user requirements it is built to address, and it can take even
experienced developers a fair amount of soul-searching to get it right.
Once the configuration variables within your application have been
identified, it is traditional to separate them from the standard variable
namespace and place them in a separate area, such that they may be manipulated
independently. Most often, these variables are placed in one or more
configuration files, and a user interface is built to interact with these
variables, to read them, and to modify them as required.
That's where this article comes in. Over the next few pages, I'm going to
introduce you to a toolkit designed specifically for manipulating configuration
files, thereby reducing the number of lines of code needed to read and modify
application variables. This toolkit is written in PHP, one of my favourite
languages, and implemented as a class, suitable for use in any PHP-based
application and accessible via standard OO techniques. Flip the page, and let me
introduce you to Config.
