Quick PHP prototyping with PHPRunner

Frank Rocco is a Senior Programmer/Analyst for St. Elizabeth Medical Center based in Utica, New York. He has been in IT since 1984, when he started programming on IBM System 38 using RPG and COBOL. He currently provides web applications for various departments as required.

Frank's job is to create database web applications using SQL Server, MySQL, and AS/400 database. Most of the data Frank works with is patient admittance and discharge information. "Before using PHPRunner to produce my web applications, I had to use Dreamweaver," says Frank. "PHPRunner reduced my development time from several days to several hours!"

Frank said it takes about ten minutes using PHPRunner to produce sophisticated CRUD (CREATE, READ, UPDATE, DELETE) web applications. PHPRunner also generates sophisticated search code to provide Hospital Staff the ability to find information quickly, such as PO Numbers or Patient Demographics.

"I really like the code that is generated by PHPRunner. What most of the code generators produce is the spaghetti code which is hard to read and maintain," says Frank

"One of the features that I find extremely useful in PHPRunner is the ability to embed your own code into events that occur in the application, such as (Before Add), (After Add). This allows me to use PHPRunner to regenerate the web application without losing my own code". One code event example is where I store our Hospital Staff's logged in UserID and date of each record added or changed.

Security is used to restrict certain Hospital Staff from adding or changing vital information. PHPRunner has great support in this area and allows restriction by group. Security can be further tailored to restrict users to several predefined conditions.

The PO Tracking application below is based on several tables with thousands of PO Records. It runs on IIS 6.0 with PHP 5 and use MySql as database of choice.

More info

Back to list of stories