@donniel said:
The custom code I've written is almost entirely for the data access layer. If I can accomplish the same in PHP in a few days, I think it will more than make up for writing from scratch.
I wrote my DAL from scratch as well. Not only did it help me brush up on my PHP, but helped me gain a good understanding of the mysqli interface. You need it!
@donniel said:
I think manually creating the database might be an option, since there's only test data in my dev. database, and the amount of tables is around 10-15, so it should be a day or twos worth of work. Do you know of any other good options to export the database structure to MySQL? Something free and simple.
I used this ... http://www.kofler.cc/mysql/mssql2mysql.txt
Free and simple!
@donniel said:
Regarding the changes to the system design and architecture, most of the hard-lifting is being done by my framework (CodeIgniter). I am depending upon it to abstract away most of the tricky stuff, like the data access layer, session management, validation, etc. I am using Zend Studio (based on Eclipse) for development, which is proving to be exceptionally useful for PHP development.
Are there any other roadblocks you can foresee?
The main issue I'm dealing with is the change in environment itself. Keyboard shortcuts in eclipse are different, apache is different (to iis), file system is different, and permissions are different. Being patient with yourself whilst you change gears helps.<o:p></o:p>