automatic-api VS StorX

A fuller list of things like this is at https://github.com/dbohdan/automatic-api

Also, I found this report that might be helpful for you. https://github.com/dbohdan/automatic-api/

Did you consider using an automatic API? This is an API that requires no or little coding, see: https://github.com/dbohdan/automatic-api

Apparently it is still common practice to have such "if bla is set, when do blub" everywhere in ones code? No functions with decorators or a similar or alternative concept? I would think there should be some kind of easy to use mechanism in place, that tends to avoid forgetting these ifs.

There are ... 60 lines of global logic, that is not encapsulated in any function or so?

Some of the functions are quite long. But I think mostly because they render out HTML.

At line 107 with the procedure printHeader starting, what I call PHP nightmare starts:

Switching back and forth between PHP, HTML and HTML with integrated JS (!!!) and CSS. All of course without syntax highlighting, but that is a minor issue. The major issue is treating HTML and JS and CSS as mere strings, instead of structured data, and the very bad readability of having procedures suddenly "end" and spit out some wild HTML, then suddenly continuing again, because some server side logic/decision is required at some place in that stream of unstructured data, whether some part is to be included or not, then the stream continues and then at some point one needs to actually check, that one did not forget to truly end the procedure. This has some of the worst readability. Maybe C code with bit magic is worse.

One can find this kind of approach in many, if not most, Wordpress plugins. What's more is, that this is also terrible for writing tests. The procedures do not return a value to check against. All is a side effect. Perhaps there is some PHP library that manipulates the PHP system, so that one can at least do string comparisons on the side effects. Like mocking, basically. But still terrible for testing.

For a comparison of how it should be done instead, check any templating engine, that at least separates template files from PHP code. Better, checkout SXML libraries, that treat HTML as structured data, a tree that can be traversed and pattern matched against, without pulling out arcane string manipulations or regular expressions. And then consider how one could write tests based on such structured data.

If this "HTML is a string, even on the server side before sending it" kind of approach is how a language treats HTML, then the language is not suitable to be directly used for HTML templating, without any additional library. This alone has caused uncountable security issues in so many projects.

I realize, that this is probably kind of a "one off script" and may not reflect other kinds of PHP code.

I did all of those things myself, years ago. And when I already had moved away from such an approach, I had to maintain a project, that was written this way. It had no tests of course. No fun. It has not that much to do with you personally being a good dev or not. I think it has to do with the ecosystem encouraging you to do these things. Outputting HTML like that should be declared illegal and should be impossible.

https://github.com/aaviator42/StorX/blob/main/StorX.php in comparison looks much better. It seems it does not output things directly. Everything seems wrapped nicely into methods. One obvious footgun seems to be another global state thing, that I really hope is not a thing in PHP itself:

    const THROW_EXCEPTIONS = TRUE;

I'm a huge fan of SQLite! My org's apps use it heavily, often via this simple key-value interface built on sqlite: https://github.com/aaviator42/StorX

Handles tens of thousands of requests a day very smoothly! :)

My org's apps heavily use this simple key-value interface built on sqlite: https://github.com/aaviator42/StorX

There's also a bunch of other purpose-built tiny utilities on that GitHub account.

I wrote a small PHP library that gives you a key-value storage interface to SQlite files: https://github.com/aaviator42/StorX

I've been dogfooding for a while by using it in my side projects.

And there's a basic API too, to use it over a network: https://github.com/aaviator42/StorX-API

This is probably ready to be used in production by others, but I wrote a library that gives you a key-value storage interface to SQlite files: https://github.com/aaviator42/StorX

And there's an API too, to use it over a network: https://github.com/aaviator42/StorX-API