Ok, seems like this is one of my yearly rituals: Trying to build some momentum behind PDO. So far it has remained lingering after every such attempt, not that this isn't partially at least my fault. I think last time I said I would work on the tests and in the end I didn't get anywhere. Unfortunately nobody came around to kick me for this lack of commitment and so the idea faded again. So enough with the gloom today is a fresh start and I think one thing has changed significantly since then: We have people posting patches for PDO on internals and someone (aka Matteo) that has been fairly steadily trying to close some tickets. Pierre also seems to be interested in putting in some time. Scott has always been committed to the SQLite driver and Ilia and Felipe have also been good for quite a few bug fixes in the past. So it seems we are closer than in quite some time to have the critical mass of people that care to get things going again!

The problem with PDO's current state is that there are just so many bugs open that it seems like a maintain. Plus the original creator(s) are busy with other things, which means the learning curve is steep. Which makes it all the more important that we both have new guys as well as experienced core developers on this. I think for too long we have waited for RDBMS vendors to bring in the momentum. However since we decided to not play according to the "rules" they have proposed, its obviously our job and not theirs. Plus once we do have momentum I am sure they will be more motivated to ensure that their driver gets at least as much love as the others. Right now if vendors are doing any work on PHP database extensions it seems they are doing it mainly for the non PDO extensions (mysql, oci8, sqlsrv). Its our job to make them realize that this is the wrong approach, by showing them that PDO is really where the community wants to be.

Anyways, I therefore invite all people that care and who want to do something to start a fresh discussion on the PDO mailinglist (hoping we can avoid the subject of the last spam mail on there) and the PDO brainstorming page (I just thew the first bits that came to mind on there) I created on the wiki. Please keep this discussion forward thinking. As in lets try not to get into complaining what PDO isn't today but instead lets think about what we want PDO to be. I think there will be room for people on all ends of the spectrum for coding on the core of PDO, helping with writing tests and documentation and running the tests. However there is little room for people that only talk, not because their opinions do not matter, but because in order to keep the discussion focused and productive we should imho focus on the topics that people will then actually address, rather than build fairy dream castles. Anyways, lets see where this takes us.

As a user I find PDO extension extremely valuable and important.

From the very moment when PDO extension became available I haven't even considered using anything else but PDO extension when creating a data access layer for applications that I am working on.

Let's think PDO! :)

It is great to see some momentum building for PDO. I am working on a PHP course for universities, to be part of the WaSP Interact Curriculum Framework, and one of my ideas is that PDO should be the first way of accessing a database that newcomers learn. Far too many books and pages still teach the old mysql API.

"Unfortunately nobody came around to kick me for this lack of commitment and so the idea faded again."

"by showing them that PDO is really where the community wants to be."

I find it hilarious that you have that contradiction in your very own blog post, if no one came around to bug you about your promised fixes then how can you assume that the entire community is behind PDO? Personally I couldn't care less.

Best of luck with it, but maybe a bit of realism would help.

Martin, don't be an ass. If you couldn't care less, don't leave a comment. This is part of the very attitude that killed PDO v1.

Lukas, way to go! I couldn't think of anyone better or more qualified to renew the PDO effort. We'll (http://rad-dev.org) support you as best we can.

I don't see any way of subscribing to the PDO mailing list.

Hi Luckas ! As you know i'm really interesting to renew and maintain PDO (fix bugs for instance). You're post is good but don't propose anything to do that. Apart the php-pdo mailing list which can not register ;-)

Hi Lukas,

Thank's for your effort! We use PDO in our new projects and really like it. We don't have any C programming skills, so we won't be able to help there. Maybe I can convince my employer to make some resources available for testing. No promises yet though...

Thanks!
Sander.

@Martin: You do have a point there ... to some extend. Most library and framework authors happily embraced PDO, because it made things soooo much easier for them. However many in the end also added adapters for the old extensions because of these open bugs and slow adoption by hosters. PDO has unfortunately ended up with no active maintainer-ship for quite some time and I think this is not because the core team or the users did not see the importance, but more because of the legal/political melt down that occurred with PDOv2 and the fact that for better or for worse PDO was mostly developed by Wez. He got a lot of ground covered in a short time, but as he is now busy with many other things, it left a void that hasn't been filled yet.

So when I am saying that we need to show that PDO is where the community is at, I am acknowledging that many people currently are not .. because of the open bugs, missing features or lack of hoster adoption. I am talking about the future. I tried to make it clear that I am not interested in looking back and more importantly not getting hung up on what some vendors want or not. We do our part and move things forward for us and if vendors care to join on our terms all the better!

Subscribing to the pdo mailinglist should work by simply sending an email to pdo-subscribe@lists.php.net. I guess is not listed on the list of mailinglists on php.net.

I'm not being an ass just to be an ass, usually things happen for a reason and in this case it seems that the view on PDO is inconsistent with the reality. When that happens you usually end up with a product that's all over the place and does everything okay but nothing really well, and that usually ends up being useless to everyone.

When you target the "community" that makes me think everyone, all the PHP programmers out there, not just the framework and library authors, because believe it or not, they're not all of the community.

Sometimes you need an ass to be blunt about a project, you usually end up with a better project that way.