ABOUT Alzabo is a two-fold program. Its first function is as a data modelling tool. Through either a schema creation interface or a custom perl program, you can create a set of schema, table, column, etc. objects that represent your data model. Alzabo is also capable of reverse engineering an existing data model. Its second function is as a RDBMS to object mapping system. Once you have created a schema, you can use the Alzabo::Runtime::Table and Alzabo::Runtime::Row classes to access its data. These classes offer a high level interface to common operations such as SQL SELECT, INSERT, DELETE, and UPDATE commands. To take it a step further, you could then aggregate a set of rows from different tables into a larger container object which could understand the logical relationship between these tables. The Alzabo::MethodMaker module can be very helpful in this regard. For more information please see the Alzabo docs (start with perldoc Alzabo) or the Alzabo homepage at http://www.alzabo.org/. The full documentation in HTML form is available at http://www.alzabo.org/docs/. Install information is in the INSTALL file. REQUIREMENTS Alzabo passes all its test with Perl 5.6.1+. 5.6.0 is known to be buggy and not recommended. Alzabo currently supports MySQL (3.23.x or 4.0.x release is recommended) and Postgres (7.2.x or newer is recommended). Alzabo also requires a number of modules, and will prompt you to install them if necessary. Of course, if you install Alzabo via the CPAN or CPANPLUS shells this will be handled for you. SUPPORT The Alzabo docs are conveniently located online at http://www.alzabo.org/docs/. There is also a mailing list. You can sign up at http://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/alzabo-general. Please don't email me directly. Use the list instead so others can see your questions. REPORTING BUGS If you are getting some sort of error message, please set the environment variable ALZABO_DEBUG to TRACE and then send the now very verbose error message to the mailing list. If you are experiencing test failures, please run the tests like this: ./Build test verbose=1 and send the output along with the bug report. Otherwise I'll just ask you to do this before I can do anything. UPGRADING As of version 0.65, Alzabo automatically upgrades older schemas as it loads them. This works for schemas made by versions going back to version 0.55. BUGS - Forking apps and Postgres In testing, I found that there were some problems using Postgres in a situation where you start the app, connect to the database, get some data, fork, reconnect, and and then get more data. I suspect that this has more to do with the DBD::Pg driver and/or Postgres itself than Alzabo. I don't believe this would be a problem with an app which forks before ever connecting to the database (such as mod_perl). I have structured the test suite to avoid this problem in testing but forewarned is forearmed (or something like that). - make_html_docs.pl and Pod::Html There are links in some of the POD that Pod::Html fails to resolve. This causes warnings when running make_html_docs.pl. However, the generated HTML files are processed to correct these problems so you can just ignore them. CREDITS Ilya Martynov deserves special thanks for providing a _lot_ of patches as well as many useful suggestions on new features, bug fixing, etc. Ken Williams contributed a number of patches, many of which focused on improving Postgres support. Bob Gustafson has provided extensive assistance in testing and debugging. Thanks very much to Randal Schwartz for spending time with me on IRC helping me find problems with the install process way back in the early releases. Some features in Alzabo have been borrowed or influenced by Class:DBI (Michael Schwern and Tony Bowden) and Tangram (Jean-Louis Leroy). Various bug reports and assistance from: Alexei Barantsev Robin Berjon Brad Bowman Terrence Brannon Remi Cohen-Scali Martin Ertl Daniel Gaspani Robert Goff Raul Nohea Goodness Michael Graham Eric Hillman Barry Hoggard Sam Horrocks Aaron Johnson Josh Jore Dan Martinez William McKee Dana Powers Jared Rhine Ron Savage Jeremy R. Semeiks