Enzyme: PHP profile/object community mgr / News: Recent posts

The latest version of the Enzyme student profile manager, 0.6.3, has been
released. See the README and CHANGES files for details. Most notably, this
release fixed the hardcoded user file directory bug by adding the variable
table and the edit_variables.php admin tool. It also adds links to the
Settings and Questions sections as promised. There ARE provisions for
upgrading an existing installation, including a db migration script.... read more

I have just released yet another version of Big Enzyme, get it while it's
hot. This is mainly just a documentation upgrade, with the added Data
Entry feature where an admin can register as a student without having to
wait for emails to arrive. See the CHANGES file for details.

Many thanks to Mike Mylonas for his contributions to the documentation!
Mike cleaned up, corrected and added to INSTALL, README.adm and in fact
added the CHANGES file.

The Enzyme project is pleased to announce the release of the latest and greatest version of the Big Enzyme, the original student profile mangement system. This fixes some bugs and adds cool new stuff

- painfully difficult and undocumented installation process now less painful, more documented

- SEED DATA: Enzyme now ships with an SQL script called locked_table_data.sql which gives you all the data you need to start using the system immediately. Namely: the state, country, sector, referrer,ethnicity, activity_type, concentration_type, school_type, etc, tables are
all filled in... read more

Enzyme is a generic engine for managing any type of XML content. At its heart is the user-supplied XML schema which provides the jumping off point for the creation of the MySQL database schema, the HTML search forms, and the HTML input forms. Therefore, in order to develop the system, we are badly in need of real-life XML schemas (or DTDs). So if you have one that you are using, of low to medium complexity, let us know!

The latest release of EnzymeTemplates simply replaces the old display_student.inc file, the one that serves as the display engine, with a version now compatible with the latest production version of PHPLIB, as well as PHP4 as opposed to PHP3. The file name of the new version is changed to display_tree.inc, additionally.

Code! I have posted the rudimentary code for parsing an XML schema and creating the database tables accordingly. MANY, nay MOST, features of the XML schema standard (http://www.w3.org/TR/xmlschema-1) are NOT supported. But it is a start. Should be food for thought about how we are going to approach this whole project. It's not very long, so download it and take a look! --Clark

Development on the Enzyme structured data management engine is beginning again. We are incorporating yet another buzzword into the project: XML. Since Enzyme is a generic system for managing structured data types, XML is an ideal fit for Enzyme, because it is a generic language for describing structured data types. Under the new architecture, the user will provide a DTD or XML schema which describes the data type he's working with, and from that document, the system will generate the database schema and all the form objects for both the data gathering and data searching forms. From there, the user will do whatever customization and graphical layout is necessary to complete the system.

SearchForms is now new and improved, with some cool demos (including phpSearchDoc - a searchable php documentation auto-generator) and many bug fixes and API improvements. SearchForms now directly inherits from PHPLIB's OOHFORMS.

The Enzyme open-source project has now released three additional object-oriented libraries for developing web applications in PHP. The first, SQL Abstraction Layer, allows web developers to create and manipulate SQL statements using an OO interface. The second, SearchForms, provides an OO library for creating HTML search-forms which generate arbitrary SQL. The third, OOHFORMS+ is an extension to the OOHFORMS library that ships with PHPLIB. All this is in addition to the code that Enzyme has already released: the EnzymeTemplates library and the full Enzyme code itself.

We recently ran into some licensing problems for our project (http://Enzyme.sourceforge.net). Since our project is an OO package written in PHP (a scripting language) the GPL does not quite apply. The GPL is designed to handle "binary redistribution" for software packages, but ours cannot be distributed in binary form. That means that someone could make a website out of a derivitive work and never have to open or disclose their code - an apparent violation of the spirit of the GPL. Now, we think it might be possible to modify the GPL to construe instances of a website sending HTML to be "executed" on a browser as redistribution, but we don't really know how to go about it. Consequently, we are forced to try and find another license. We have looked at the Artistic and the APSL, but these are both pretty dubious. Has anyone else run into problems like this? We want to write to both the OSI and FSF and bring this to their attention, so we'd like to find out of others have run into the same situation.

EnzymeTemplates are late-binding, database-backed, and object-oriented. Let's
take each of those separately.

1) database-backed
Unlike other template libraries which require you to explicitly initialize
your template values using their syntax, EnzymeTemplates automatically
loads your data out of a database and makes it available to your template
designer by the same names as the fields in your database. You'll never have to write a single line of SQL to use EnzymeTemplates.... read more

We've made our very first code release! Enzyme is a web-based program written in PHP and PHPLIB that allows db-backed searches and data collection. Right now it's primary use is as a recruiting/HR management tool - to see it in action check out http://www.CatalystRecruiting.com and for more information there's always http://enzyme.sourceforge.net!

Enzyme is based on the backend engine developed for the commercial web site CatalystRecruiting.com. It's a system for gathering data so that it
can be searched according to specific pre-arranged criteria. For instance,
CatalystRecruiting.com collects college students' resume data in a
structured way; employers then do searches based on specific criteria
(skills, school, GPA, SAT score, etc), as opposed to flat text keyword
searches. The student "profiles" also can contain a photo, writing
samples, and other components that are not searchable, but are of course
viewable once the profile is "found" as the result of a search. ... read more