This is an architecture question. If there is a better forum, please redirect me. Apologies in advance.
Essentially every website is built around a relational database, right? When a user uploads form data, that data is stored in a table. The problem is that the table structure(s) need to be modified whenever the website form is modified. Although I understand that modern web frameworks work around this problem by automatically building forms based on the table structure.
For the last 20 years, I have been building websites using Perl. When I first encountered this problem, the easiest solution was to save serialized Perl objects as data BLOBS. After XML's introduction, this solution worked even better because XML is so effective for representing arbitrary data. This approach is consistent with the original Perl principles of Hubris, Laziness, and Impatience and I'm pretty committed to it.
Obviously, the biggest drawback is that this solution locks me into the Perl interpreter. So instead, I've just completed a prototype of a universal RDB table. The prototype is written in Perl but porting it to PHP will be a good chance to develop those skills. The principal is based on the XML::Dumper module, which converts arbitrary Perl data structures into uniform XML. With my approach, each XML node is stored as a table record.
I underestimated this undertaking and rolled something up myself. But the effort allows me to discuss the basic design instead of implementation details.
As mentioned, I'm pretty committed to this approach of using flexible data structures. It's been successfully deployed on many websites, large, and complex. But are there any drawbacks I've overlooked?
I rolled my own. Are other people taking a similar approach to their data? What kinds of solutions are available?
I have not abandoned my dream of eventually contributing something useful to the worldwide community. In order to proceed, the next step would be peer review. How does one pursue that effort?
Thanks!
-Jim
