I bet many of you programmers out there have heard about ORM, object-relational mapping. That is about converting object-oriented data structure into SQL-accessible relational database structures. For now there's been several approaches to do this, including Hibertnate, Doctrine, Propol and many others.
For Mediabird to be as compatible as possible, we have now evaluated Doctrine and other PHP ORM solutions.
Unfortunately, there is no cross-language toolset (where only the syntax would be different) and additionally, when integrating with third-party platforms such as CommSy or Moodle, we'll have to think twice about how to get through to the database (using ORM). We'll of course appreciate any support by experienced ORM developers.
For now, it seems to be the best option just to use Doctrine for the ordinary Mediabird widget version and develop a layer for the Moodle DB wrapper and CommSy. Well, thatis a wrapper for a wrapper, but anyway.
And for those of you interested in using Mediabird from any site, there's an easy-to-embed widget version in development. That will allow you just to insert a snippet of HTML on your website and to allow the users of your website to take notes using the Mediabird website. There will be back-linking from the notes to your site, such that your users will never loose the link to your pages... Stay tuned.
2009/02/28 18:09
Development
