DMZ 1.7.1 (DataMapper OverZealous Edition)

[eluser]OverZealous[/eluser]
Important News Regarding DataMapper OverZealous Edition

Hello everyone,

As many of you might have noticed, I have not updated DMZ in quite some time (late March, in fact). This has been mostly due to the fact that since then, I have been working full time at a new job, in a different state. I really have not had a lot of time, and even if I did, I have been working off a small laptop.

Moving On...
In the last couple of weeks, I have started learning about Groovy and Grails, a dynamic scripting language built on top of the Java Virtual Machine, and a rapid web application development platform, respectively. In reading about these tools, I have found excitement in developing that I have not had in some time.

This platform provides nearly all of the rapid-development potential of CodeIgniter, as well as the ability to write well-defined, strongly-typed code when needed. It also has a large library of plugins, and many features that require a lot of hand-work to enable in CI. Maybe most importantly, it has a very powerful ORM built-in, one that not only does everything that DMZ does, and more gracefully, but is significantly more flexible and can even build and update your database on-the-fly, based on the models. There are so many features in Grails/GORM I always wanted to add to DMZ, but I never really found the time.

Many of my frustrations with CodeIgniter, such as the numerous bugs in the ActiveRecord library, poorly designed Session library, lack of built-in GET support, and various other issues, seem to be resolved in the Grails setup. This is probably because it is backed by frameworks that have been around for a while now, such as J2EE, Spring, and Hibernate.

For many of you, this may not be very interesting. Because I run my own servers, I have the ability to install Java and a servlet engine as needed. However, if you rely on a shared hosting plan, you will most likely not be able to use Java. In fact, this was the very reason I started working with PHP and CodeIgniter in the first place. (On that note: SliceHost is a great, low-cost way to get your own servers running.)

DMZ Can Live On!
What does this mean for DMZ? In short, I'm looking to hand the reins over to someone else. I haven't used or worked on the library since late May. It's already going stale, with numerous outstanding bugs that I have no plans to correct.

Because DMZ is 100% open source, you don't have to contact me if you don't want. However, I have extra materials and tools that I can pass on to anyone who'd like to make DMZ their own.

Please be aware that this is a large library, with a lot of complex code underneath. It requires a pretty strong understanding of PHP's magic functions (__get, __call), database design and management, and memory usage. It also requires a bit of dedication, since the relatively small community around DMZ is highly active.

I really hope someone comes forward, and is willing to let DMZ live on. (When I stopped working on the HTMLForm library I asked for a volunteer, but no one offered, and it has effectively died out for that reason.)

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So, please, if you are interested, I'll happily ZIP up all of the content I have for DMZ, and send it over. I'll eventually be replacing the current DMZ URL with links to anyone who would like to host the manual and downloads. (Please note, the current downloads are hard-coded in the manual to my website. If you do decide to host it, a search-and-replace will probably be in order.) If no one comes forward, I'll upload the latest version to the CodeIgniter wiki, so it can still be downloaded.

Thank You,