A qestion about programming structure

kazumahsu

First I like to say hi to everyone on the board, I am new here but I have been reading and learning from the many posts here. I will jump straight into my little confusion now (it is a bit long, so please bare with me):

At the company that I am working for, a co-worker and I are in charge of developing a "Learning Management Platform" which is basically a platform where one can manage accounts and course contents and to allow the viewing of the contents by the students.

The problem is that the boss is not satisfied with our way of programming. He wants a structure that's leaning more toward OOP, so here's a breakdown of how he wants it to be done:

a "Core" set of object that basically just takes the SQL requests and runs it and spit back the result without any formatting.
a "Translation" layer which are divided by "Select", "Update", "Insert", "Delete" into 4 files, and each file will have many different variations of basically doing the same thing (for each different function of the platform).
a "Application" layer which does the form checking, final formatting of the info from DB before giving it out to the webpage.
a "Display" layer which is basically an HTML file that shows the formatted values from the "Application" layer.

My problem with this approach is that I do not see how the "Translation" layer is needed and it seems to be breaking the code into too many small peices (which in my view will slow down the code since there are many more include files to open and more if/switches to run through); sometimes, we also run into the problem of seeing the "Translation" and the "Core" layer to be doing the same thing.

Can someone shead some light on what are the possible solution to make this the easiest to modify later while still running fast?

Thanks

tbach2

I'm not sure I see the point of the translation layer as explained here. The rest of it makes very good sense: the core layer allows you to communicate with any database by just extending a class; and the application layer handles all the "thinking" while the display layer formats it to whatever format you want to use.

But that translation layer sounds like mumbo jumbo...

Now I can see it working if we have a separate layer that builds data structures. IOW, the data structure layer orders the data using the core layer to access the db. Perhaps that's what he means, and he wants this data structure layer separated into 4 different files so that you don't end up with one HUGE class that does everything-- retrieving, updating, deleting, etc.

I think I would rather have it all together... but then again I'm self-taught, so maybe that would be a better way.

FWIW, that's the way I see it.

BTW, sounds like PHPLib would work very well for you-- it has auth/sessions/templates all together in one package. Using this, all you would have to do is build objects in the translation(?) layer, and scripts which would access the objects and hand out data to the templatess.