This time next week I will be trying to flag down a taxi at the airport in Toronto, having come back from the Vancouver PHP Conference 2007. I'm looking forward to giving my "What Can PHP Learn From Ruby on Rails" talk because I'll be doing a screencast of my talk. However, I'm struggling with trying to decide what to do with it.

If I give it away, then the people who see me in person are getting ripped off. If I charge for it, the question then becomes how much to charge? $5? $10. One model I've been thinking of trying is that if 20 people by the screencast I will give it away for free after that point. We shall see what ends up happening.

Over on the CakePHP mailing list, someone asked a question about how to build a model without accessing a database. I pointed out that it can be done, and that there were examples. Then, I got schooled by nate...

I definitely wasn't agreeing with you, but I wasn't really making fun of you either. I'll give you a hint: there's a reason why we have a base DataSource class, which is extended by DboSource, which talks to the database on behalf of a model. Felix's Google Analytics model is actually a pretty poor example. Not because Felix is a bad coder or anything (quite the contrary), but because up till now, there are a few things that people really haven't clearly understood (or perhaps, there are a few things we haven't made clear for people). Basically what I'm trying to say is that you should never have to extend Model in that way. Models are designed to *model* data, not handle the details of accessing it.

But Nate did have a good point. I didn't fully understand how the Model was built up in CakePHP because, well, I never really had to before. I think when I build my first CakePHP 1.2x site I'll dig into the internals a little more.

Now, I've noticed a few blog postings about mysqlnd, a native MySQL driver for PHP 6 (for now) and beyond. As an aside, I should try installing PHP 6 somewhere just to see how they are progressing. Anyhow, back to mysqlnd. Why is this significant? There are, in my mind, two things why you should know about it.

Firstly, mysqlnd is designed to take advantage of PHP's own infrastructure. I imagine this means that you can expect better performance from this library as opposed to the old libmysql or the newer libmysqli. I understand it's aimed at PHP 6 for the time being, due to some of the work being done with Unicode in PHP 6. There is talk of backporting it to PHP 5, or even PHP 4 (something to do with streams meaning you could backport) but it's aimed squarely at PHP 6 for now.

The second big reason is that it will provide a library for PHP to talk to MySQL databases that has a license that is more compatible with PHP. In fact, it will be released under the PHP license. MySQL has an exception for allowing libmysql to be integrated with FLOSS projects, of which PHP is one. Having a native driver that doesn't require an exception to use can only be a good thing.