PHPRunner – PHP code generator for your MySQL database: A few weeks ago, I talked about ASPRunner, which is a code-generation engine to build ASP pages to manage ODBC databases.
At the end of that post, I whined that I wanted something similar for PHP/MySQL. Well…
PHPRunner creates set of PHP pages to access and modify any local or remote MySQL database. Using generated PHP pages users can search, sort, edit, delete, and add data into database.
This software is really top-notch. The interface is exceptionally well-done, and the code it generates is fantastic. All code templates are available, so you can actually tweak the master code that the generated code is based on.
There’s support for relational tables – you can provide dropdown lists for fields based on information in other tables – either pick from a wizard or write your own SQL. The system spits out pages to list, add, edit, delete, print, export (to Word, Excel, XML, or CSV), and search data. You can pick from a variety of stylesheets, or you can massage the HTML yourself.
Really, really great stuff. My gut aches at the “quick-and-dirty” projects (that were never “quick” enough) that I labored away on that this app could have written for me. I hate writing admin interfaces, and the time I wasted to get results inferior to what PHPRunner provides absolutely makes me sick.
As a postscript, I got into a pleasant email conversation with Sergey, the brains behind the *Runner software. Nice guy. I sent him an email that outlined what I think would be the killer upgrade to something like this. Instead of rehashing it, here’s the entire email.
(After reading that, you need to know that there’s nothing stopping you from implementing my plan now. Remember the source templates are freely editable, and you just need to write the master PHP to implement what I describe.)