Ever needed a quick and lightweight MySQL PHP library for some small single/multi page project? Pulling out a full ORM is just overkill, but writing the PHP code needed to connect to the server, run a query, and process the results is a lot of hassle? I thought so. I've been there too.

So what if you could do something like this:

<?php
$sql = new litemysql('host', 'username', 'password', 'testdb', 'books');
$books = $sql->find_all(array("author" => "John Twelve Hawks"));
?>

Rather than something like this:

<?php
$db = mysql_connect("host", "username", "password");
if (!$db) die("Could not connect: " . mysql_error());
$db_selected = mysql_select_db("testdb", $link);
if (!$db_selected) die("Can't use testdb : " . mysql_error());
$result = mysql_query("SELECT * FROM `books` WHERE `author` = 'John Twelve Hawks';");
$books = array();
while ($row = mysql_fetch_assoc($result)) {
    $books[] = $row;
}
?>

About two years ago, I found myself in need of just such a small, lightweight library. There were full ORMs like ADOdb and others available, but they were serious overkill for the kind of simple stuff I needed. After some googling, I noticed there didn't seem to be any in-between libraries. Either you had to go for a whole jumbo jet, or start folding your own paper airplanes, and I didn't like either option. I just wanted to grab existing paper airplanes, and start throwing them in the direction I needed them to go.

So in true geek fashion when you want something ready-made to make your life easy, I ended up building my own such library. Spending an order of magnitude more time on the MySQL connection part of the project than I would have needed if I'd just done it the ugly way as the second code example above.

And that's how I started building LiteMySQL. Rather than building it from the ground up though, I started by lifting the essential parts from the full ORM/ActiveRecord implementation I'd written for Zynapse, and mainly just wrote glue-code to make it a feature-complete library.

After close to a year of being ignored, I recently spent an afternoon fixing some long-standing bugs, migrating to GitHub, and writing some decent documentation for the project.

You can read more, and download the library here.

So I finally bit off my own sense of perfection in regards to my Zynapse web-development framework for PHP5 which I started developing in 2007. It was never perfect, never ready, so I never released.

Now after close to two years of hardly working on it, and doing most things with Ruby on Rails, I've decided to push it up on GitHub as is.

So check out Zynapse on GitHub if you're interested.