Everything makes sense now

I was quite happy about the total reengineering. I started in a brand new directory and created brand new scripts. It was totally new approach, but the puzzle finally clicked together.

My first neglected todo was renaming the key table. There was no reason for calling it "a", it was historical reason when everything was put into "attribute" table. Because I came up with the name "particle" for the data structure and I still like single-letter name for tables, I renamed "a" to "p". As a result I was unable to use anything I created so far right away, I had to dip into everything. And it was a good thing.

I knew everything will be either a list, detail or edit form. In my opinion this realization was the second most important invention for QetriX, after particle. I was able to stick with these three components and create a compact code, as I always wanted. It would require much more discipline from me to keep everything in order.

Even QetriX is more about methodology, the idea without implementation is quite worthless. So I decided I'll rebuild the system in PHP again, maybe later in C# .NET or it will be my case-study for Java, Android, iOS, HTML5 or whatever... :)

I designed a new object model. I don't like bloated object apps with giant code overhead, mostly because I didn't use advantages of OOP, like inheritation. All my code uses KISS approach (Keep It Simple, Stupid), so I didn't feel the urge to organize my functions into static methods. But I knew if I want to make the code open source one day, I need to abandon my 1990s coding habits :)

I was going to create something like framework, so for a few weeks I studied some of the most used - Nette, Zend, CodeIgniter, CakePHP, Symfony, FatFree (lightweight counterpart), plus MediaWiki and Wordpress. Closest "to my heart" was CodeIgniter.

I created URL parser (routing) first. It will combine class-method approach with URL rewriter (for particular entity, loaded from database). I established a basic set of rules for certain URL patterns for determining what part of URL will be detected as class, method, entity ID and parameters. If no class is found, system asks database for entity URL and if no correspoding URL is found, HTTP 404 is fired. And if URL contains /data/, system searches for corresponding file to offer for download.

After quite long and sometimes quite frustrating debug it works like a charm. I'm still thinking about reducing some lines in code though, I'll be happy to omit file_exists checks for certain cases as this code is executed all the time. On the other hand without this part working I was unable to continue in development, so eventually I sacrificed few milliseconds for sturdy and reliable code.