I know this topic was discusses a couple of times, but none of them represents the ultimate solution for me.
Situation
I'm designing a relational mysql database which later should hold multilingual content. You know this from the Wikipedia or Microsoft Tech Support Pages. The contents should be the same for every language. e.g If translations are missing the site offers you the same content automatically translated or in the languages which the information is available in. If some values are not set, it should fallback to the second or default browser language or translate it e.g. through google. Development environment is Zend.
My ideas so far are for Solving the Problem:
Two Primary Keys: (ID, Language)
Advantage: Easy Database Access through database abstraction layers.
Problem: Foreign Keys, Relations ships, Fallbacks
Columns with language suffix:
Advantage: DB Performance, No relational Problems.
Problem: Database abstraction layers cannot handle this?
Has any concept proven itself or is preferable over the other? Has anyone already created something like this and can share his experience with me? Does a modified Zend DB Controller exist for this situation? How do you link this information to a form?
Thank you for your help, hints and suggestions!
Kind regards,
Manuel
The second option would be not maintainable (this should be added on the minuses side). To actually add another language you'll need to modify table and abstraction layers. Sounds like a nightmare.
The first option seems much more promising but unfortunately there is a lot to do to make it work. However, from my experience this is rather typical solution, so I would not reinvent the wheel.
What I have to add is, language fallback should be done on the Zend side, database would miss some information. You may think of some kind of index table to hold information such as unique id of the contents and available languages. If you need to serve something, you would read such record, compare it against of Accept Languages and ask database again for valid contents (using the most suitable language). The only problem is, you would need to create such an index table somehow (the best way I see would be trigger on inserting contents to your content table).
A lot of work but the problem is not too easy.
I am working on the exact same problem right now.
Somehow it does not make sense to me to add everything into the same database. Lets say I want to go to the extreme and support some 50 languages this would just bloat my DB. So, I tend to keep my main DB in my main language and then introduce some Zend_Translate concept into it. Zend_Translate should give you the fallback solution you are looking for. While the main navigation and core design is not much of a problem for my web site my biggest concern right now is how to store all the main content and how to translate because these elements contain HTML among other things. For the main content I will probably use some alternate approach and use a separate DB with tables for each language.
My plattform will be a community driven database. So I actually gonna rely on humans translating it. You have to store the information anyways, so my first concern is not the database size or performance, but easy usability. So far my idea is to implement some structure as described above, not yet sure if i'll do it in doctrine or not.
Language decision:
Start, application gets users preset language, secondary language, english mother-tong of the article. Fetching the article from the database I will check the following for every column: 1. is the primary language available? 2. Is the secondary language available? 3. If neither of them, display article in mother-tong or english and offer the user to translate it with suggestions from the google translate api. I guess it's gonna be quite a bit of coating and manipulating controllers or building a business model doing this.
#tawfekov is something like this or similar easily realizable with doctrine?
Related
I was reading at this article https://www.infoq.com/articles/spring-data-intro to understand how can a data service layer be independent of database(RDBMS /NoSQL). It looks like there's no way to design entity and repository to be independent of database. This article was written on 2012. Do we've any other technologies since then that has implemented this feature?
Before actually answering your question I have to ask: Why do you want to do that? Think twice because abstraction comes at a cost and just doing it in order to have a "clean" design is most certainly not worth it.
Now to your question:
There is no library or framework that does this out of the box.
Probably the thing getting closest to it is spring data which you are obviously aware of. If you stick to the persistent storage independent interfaces your repositories will abstract over the persistence store use at least to some extent. BUT: you will have to provide different kinds of metadata (typically as annotations on the entities) to make it work. So in this sense, it is a really leaky abstraction.
Of course, you can roll your own: create an interface with the operations you need and provide implementations for the different data stores you want to use. Also, include a storage independent way of providing metadata.
So the question becomes: Why hasn't anybody done that yet? And why you probably shouldn't do it either?
It is hard: Just writing SQL in a way that all (relevant) SQL databases understand is difficult, see this for an example.
You loose a lot of power of your stores. For example, RDBMSes are great at joining stuff. But joining is basically a no go for many No-SQL databases. So your API probably shouldn't offer this feature. This basically dumbs everything down to the common denominator, which is going to be really small when you have very different data stores.
It is not worth it. This leads back to my opening question: Why would you want to do it anyway? I certainly see the use of switching different RDBMSes. Some companies only want certain vendors in their datacenter, it is nice to have an in memory variant for testing and so on. But switching a store from for example Oracle to Hazelcast and then to MongoDB to CSV? Why would you want to do that? What is the business value of that?
i am currently in the process of planning a social network project of mine. after turning ideas & inputs in my mind for a very long time i am now starting to put thoughts on paper concretely. the network will be for a very specific group of people (so no bad facebook copy) and their industry.
the problem i am facing now is the choice of a framework or the decision to sit down and program everything ourselves. i know that there is a lot of php frameworks out there and i have spent quite a while checking the options.
i have marked zend and yii as my favorites so far from what i have seen and heard, but there is one issue i could not get information about.
the network will have 3 (in the future even 4) completely different profile types. the first type will be an institution (such as a school), the second will be someone directly affiliated by it (such as a teacher) and the third will be random people (students, parents, etc..)*.
*it will be different things of course but just so you get the idea.
-> there will be different rules of interaction between the different profile types. they will have completely different fiels to fill out, so i will create 3 different databases for them.
my question: there will only be one login, one page. which framework do you think could give me some possibilities to handle 3 different usertypes and their interaction rules? should i rely on a framework at all or should i start from scratch?
thank you for the input in advance,
sebastian =)
Well I will also suggest Yii because it is strongly object oriented language and gives you ability to have heavy app behaving light weight application.
Very strong ORM is its beauty. I suggest you plan it first then take a start.first have a brief knowledge of its structure and then start
you can handle multiple profiles by Modules.I recently made This using Yii it has 3 roles so far Admin,Teacher,Student and two of them has profiles.
Happy programming :)
As mentioned before this is not a framework issue.
It might be 3 tables in one database :
- one for institutions
- one for profiles
- one for relations between those, with a status field for the relationtype.
When choosing a framework : consider it's simplicity for rapid development.
I really Don't think you should use 3 different databases for something as futile as a User Type. Rather model user types in the single database.
I personally use Yii, as a Php framework, which offcourse is able to handle multiple usertypes. But I wonder if you realize what you use a framework for. I think you guys rather stop searching for the right framework, but rather lookup the right content-manager
Good luck
I'm a computer engineer student and i've got a basically simple assignment but i'd like to make it a little more interesting :). Basically I have to create a simple multiuser, online document versioning system using Java or .NET. Because I'm more a .NET guy I'm gonna use ASP.NET or Silverlight (it's not yet decided).
Anyway the intersting part: I want to use MongoDB to store the documents (they can be virtually anything, video, audio, simple MSOffice files, plain text), each version of them and the related metadata (which library, folder they're in etc). I'd like to put anything else, like users, permissions etc.(the specs are not yet completed) in to an ordinary relational database. The question is what do you think about this? Do you think this makes any sense or I'm just trying to over complicate the whole thing? Would it be simpler to use only mongodb for everything or leave the nosql thingy entirely out of it? Is there any conventions for this kind of stuff? :)
BTW. under any other circumstences I'd use some free, battle tested solution for doc versioning, but I have to design and implement this myself, and I'm trying to do it at least a little unconventionally :).
Thanks for every comment:), any help appreciated:)
Greets
If you were using something like Mongoid on Rails, this would be trivial. http://mongoid.org/docs/extras.html Look for Versioning. The ODM has it built in for you. I've yet to use Mongo in the .NET world, it's always been something like Raven, so I'm not sure if the libraries for it easily work like Mongoid does.
Mongo handles relational data as well. Things you want normalized (e.q. user records) can have references to other documents in the DB. And of course what ever magic document you want to store works as well.
Doing things unconventionnaly is usually a good way to discover new ways (better ways ?) so it's a good idea.
Using mongodb is a good idea too because of the schemaless property.
USing a relationa database for storing extra information is quite weird and will add more complexity without any advantage (IMO)
What are your thoughts on go-pgsql and thrift4go?
I'd like to use Go with either Postgres or Hypertable for a project, but I'm curious as to how mature and complete these interfaces are.
I don't have specific experience with go-psql, but since there's no answer I'll write my thoughts.
There are issues with the current implementation, which might bite you (e.g. time resolution lower than seconds is ignored. What happens if you update a single field, but your ORM decides to include a time field within the query?).
Other problem that I see is, there's no promise this project will be maintained as long as you wish.
Another approach is to build a very simple binding to the postgres C interface, and just use it. In that case, the abstraction is not very helpful, but definitely not leaky. And it might be enough.
That's what Russ Cox (from the core Go (golang) team) ended up doing for sqlite.
I need to create a internal website and can't figure out if we should be writing our own, or using an existing framework.
Most of the website will essentially be a front end to a database. We need to have a number of people enter data into forms. We then want to be able to show different views of all this data -- including running small queries (e.g. how many resources do we have with attribute 'X'). As is usually the case with this, we will want to tweak the UI on a regular basis.
There actual data design is not a simple 1:1 mapping of resource to entry. For example, we might track several attributes for one item as the "base set of data" for that item. Then we could have several additional sets of data.
Imagine a recipe application. You might have a recipse for a starter. This could then be referenced by several other recipes that need that same information.
I feel like this is best suited for a general framework (Ruby on Rails, Django, etc), but I wonder if it might not be good for a "traditional" CMS platform like Drupal? I specifically mention Drupal since the people that would develop this have the most knowledge using php and MySql.
I usually lean towards wanting to use an existing platform, but am interested in other people's thoughts. To give you an idea of scope, I would imagine if we wrote this from scratch we are probably talking about 3-5 weeks of development.
Would you recommend writing our own, or using an existing framework? If you would suggest using something that exists what would you recommend?
Would you consider this to be best suited for a straight framework or a straight CMS?
Thanks!
It's possible that Drupal will be a good solution for you, though you'll probably need a few key additional modules like the "Content Creation Kit" (CCK) and "Views".
Unlike other web CMS systems (WordPress, Exponent, phpNuke), Drupal treats your entries as a "pool" of content, from which you pull various subsets for different areas of your site.
There is a lot of documentation for Drupal (almost too much), the biggest problem is finding the piece that's relevant to what you're trying to achieve. Diving on to one of the interactive IRC channels can be a good idea, as the community is quite helpful and is almost always willing to give you a pointer in the right direction.
The power, flexiblity and capability of Drupal is both its biggest strength and weakness - I know it took me a bit of effort to get my head around key concepts, and I'm far from being a Drupal Expert.
One last comment: Having written my own CMS from scratch, which I abandoned in favour of Drupal, I'd suggest your 3-5 week estimate is likely on the light side.
Stay away from Drupal for any site that requires customized functionality. I recently used Drupal for a website at work, and it was VERY difficult to figure out how to get it to do what I wanted it to do. There is a lot of documentation out there, but all of it is unhelpful -- it answers very specific questions about specific issues but does not provide any context as to how you would approach building the site as a whole. If you're a programmer, using a more general framework will probably work better, as CMS's are designed for a specific kind of site, and if you want your site to have non-standard functionality you are going to be fighting the system instead of working with it. If your developers are most experienced in PHP, try one of the PHP frameworks that mimics the architecture of Rails -- e.g. cakePHP or CodeIgniter.
CMSes usually make sense when you have a broad and potentially expanding array of different content types and modes you need to handle. Drupal has literally dozens. Given than you mentioned RoR, it sounds like what you need is more of a MVC style framework. Maybe similar to the sort of thing stackoverflow was built with. .NET an issue for you?
If you are really limited to 3-5 weeks, however, I think a Rails-based strategy makes sense so go with RoR or CodeIgniter
If Drupal can do what you need easily I would say go with Drupal. I don't know much about Drupal though.
Otherwise, what you describe sounds like a data driven web app or more like a reporting app. It sounds like you might have some very specific needs or that users might want very specific needs in the future. That is something hard to get from premade software since you have no idea what users are going to request. Since I'm a programmer I would probably want to build it myself.
Funny you should ask... I just came across this in SD Time's Linkpalooza this afternoon:
Ten free powerful content management systems…
There are at least 4 more mentioned in the comments to this post.
It seems to make little sense to develop a new one with so many from which to choose!
BTW, this is neither a recommendation nor endorsement of any particular CMS.
Treat Drupal as a framework. Core modules + CCK + Views is a good start to build on.
If you're doing something that you might want to expose to other applications, consider the Services module. A lot of interesting things have been done with flex frontends connected to drupal running services with amfphp.