Through my work in developing a system for entering and displaying staff resumes I have become involved in a project for capturing staff skills and capabilities across the entire organisation. My part is fairly small, basically updating the resume system, but it is giving me an insight into working as part of a larger team and experiencing proper project management.
I flew down to Canberra for a team meeting on Wednesday, then participated in a video conference yesterday. Without a close view of the other members of the team I found it difficult to read when somebody else was about to say something and found myself butting in a few times. I wonder what our telepresence team would have thought of that.
I am rewriting my resume application to run on the latest version of PHP and to replace the PEAR::MDB database abstraction library with the newer PEAR::MDB2. There are quite a few changes, including replacing all my FetchInto's with FetchRow and altering the connection function. The biggest change for me was handling the initial loading of the database scheme. This has now been moved into the PEAR::MDB2_Scheme library.
I find it very useful to make changes to the database structure through a Metabase XML scheme, but MDB2 does offer some interesting possibilities for managing the database using the MDB2 functions. It should be possible to more easily configure the database from the application itself.