Change to the DAL API

To continue posting about recent backwards compatibility breaks; I think this one is rather significant although its simple.

The Database Access Layer (“DAL”) is one of the most well written components ever since its initial debut in 0.9, it haven’t change since then (except with the addition of new drivers). In Engine 1.1 Beta 2, this is subject to a minor change that changes the signature of one of the driver methods.

So what’s changed, and why?

The method to check if a driver is supported at runtime have currently the following signature:

<?php
	boolean isDriverSupported(void);
?>

This method will now have an optional parameter, so the signature will now be as follows:

<?php
	boolean|array isDriverSupported([ boolean $verbose = false ]);
?>

So why this change? This is for extracting meta information about the actual driver dependencies tested when seeing if the driver is supported. I thought about adding a new method, perhaps under the name of ‘getDriverDependencies()’, either one could work, but one thing is for sure, either solution will be implemented in the Beta 2, if you are sneaky enough then you will see why in SVN

This was a rather short post, but its gearing towards some new stuff that Engine 1.1 is yet to reveal, so stay tuned!