Over the past couple of years many tools have been developed to address the limitations of PHP when building large database applications. These tools can be divided into two categories:
DB Interfaces are a new category of tools that sits between the application logic and the database logic. When an application reaches a certain size, the rules change about how it should be built. The design rules for a single HTML page with some embedded PHP are much different from a 15,000 line PHP application. As the complexity of an application grows, manageability decreases. Although PHP is designed to be embedded into HTML, this ability becomes inhibiting as the application becomes more complex. Embedded SQL suffers from the same limitations as imbedded PHP. As application size grows, maintainability becomes more difficult.
A more manageable solution is using a Database interface to communicate with the database. DB Interfaces separate the database logic from the application logic. By using a DB interface, DML operations are separate from the logic flow, which makes code easier to work with. It is best to use a database interface to handle the DML operations on a table. By using a database interface to provide a single point of data modification, a finer level of security and data integrity can be achieved.
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