2004-03-23 · in Ideas · 125 words

Whenever I develop a database-backed web application, I find myself wanting to do the same things frequently: displaying a list of records, displaying a single record, editing a single record in a form. Sometimes the "data types" in the record might actually be IDs that correspond to records in other tables, but the relationships are only rarely more complex than that.

I want an OO framework that I can use to very simply wrap a database table and make it editable via a web interface, or to display the results of a query in an HTML table. Besides having ways of declaring the contents of the table, I'd also need a way of declaring custom datatypes (for instance, "pick a user from this other table").