How can we make working with data in PHP easier?

Scottlib is a library of data management tools for PHP. You decide how much control you want, and scottlib conforms to your specific needs.

I've written scottlib for people who have vision but lack the technical savvy for learning languages on top of the bear essentials needed for prototyping (like PHP, HTML and CSS). Scottlib makes it easy for these designers to turn their ideas into functional realities.

Those with greater technical skill will find scottlib to be a powerful tool for simplifying the implementation of their applications' data models.

Guiding principles make a project successful.

Adopt one database platform, and utilize it well. Scottlib is not database agnostic (yet). I have chosen MySQL because it works well, I know it well, and it and PHP were undoubtedly separated at birth.

Configuration belongs in the code, not in YAML and not in XML. With scottlib, you configure your database objects with php-doc annotations in a style inspired by the Java Persistence API.

A growing data model should not harm an application's efficiency. Generate less (or no) code, implement more functionality in the base classes, and let the framework do the caching.

Two choices: terminate on exception or log a warning. And when configured for termination, do so by throwing a logically named exception back to the Controller: zero thread death inside the model layer.

Absolute normalization. If your model isn't normalized, you're trying too hard.