PHPCR

A (better) way to structure your content

PFCongres 2013 Uncon - 14 september 2013

Willem-Jan Zijderveld

PHP Developer at Beeldspraak

Twitter: @willemjanz

Blog: blog.willem-jan.net

Github: github.com/wjzijderveld

Email: wjzijderveld@gmail.com

This is my very first talk, please be gentle

What's this talk about

PHP Content Repository

Why would I need PHPCR
What is PHPCR
Who is using it
When to use it
When not to use it

Why would I need PHPCR

CMS data isn't always structured
NoSQL isn't always a fit, but has similarities
Makes it easy to switch storage engines
A lot of build-in features

Examples unstructured: banners, attachments, extra content
NoSQL doesn't work well for trees/graph, basic fulltext searching
PHPCR just defines the transport, not the storage
Workspaces, Versioning, Locking, Import/Export and more

What is PHPCR

Ported from JCR-283 for TYPO3/Flow3
- Removed JAVA overhead
- Added PHP specifics
- Some naming changed
- PHPCR Utils
Tree of nodes

It's a standard, 'just' a set of interfaces
Typecasting in PHP is a whole lot easier then in JAVA
Added Traversable and Iterators
Removed some helper methods to avoid Object creation overhead
Utils are created to help implementing: property type conversion, UUID generation, helpers

What is PHPCR

Nodes

Nodes have a name and a type
A node has a path
Nodes can have named properties with values

path is a parent path + node name

names can be namedspaced

A node type can dictate what type of children it can contain, nt:unstructured allowes everything. Can be used to create a 'schema'

What is PHPCR

Workspaces

Can be compared with branches in a VCS or with a filesystem

Who is using it

Jackalope (Jackrabbit/Doctrine-DBAL)
- Symfony CMF
- ServerGrove KnowledgeBase
- TYPO3
- Vespolina and Sylius
Midgard2

Symfony CMF, almost reaching 1.0
eCommerce can use it to save f.e. product properties
Midgard can be used for web but also desktop applications
JAVA: Magnolia CMS

When to use it

Hierarchical data
With compound data; like attachments or translations
When you need versioning
When in need of FullText search

Jackalope-Doctrine-DBAL doesn't support FulltextSearch yet :)

When not to use it

Strict structured data
Aggregation

Questions?