README

Sag
===

Version 0.7.1
http://www.saggingcouch.com

Sag is a PHP library for working with CouchDB. It is designed to not force any
particular programming method on its users - you just pass PHP objects, and get
stdClass objects and Exceptions back. This makes it trivial to incorporate Sag
into your application, build different functionality on top of it, and expand
Sag to incorporate new CouchDB functionality.

Compatability
-------------

Each Sag release is tested with an automated testing suite against CouchDB
1.0.x and 1.1.x, and PHP 5.3.x. Lower versions of CouchDB 0.11.x and 0.10.x,
and PHP 5.2.x will likely work with Sag, but they are not officially supported,
so your mileage may vary.

If you are running pre-1.0.1 CouchDB or pre-5.3 PHP, then you probably want to
look into updating your environment.

Contents
--------

CHANGELOG                       A detailed list of all changes between
                                releases, including any breaking changes.

LICENSE                         A copy of the license that Sag is released under.

NOTICE                          Sag's copyright notice(s).

README                          This file.

Makefile                        Used to run unit tests, create releases, etc.

examples/                       Examples of how to use Sag.

src/                            This is the code that you will want to include
                                in your application.

src/Sag.php                     This is the core file that you will include()
                                or require() in your code.

src/SagException.php            The SagException class. You don't need to
                                include it.

src/SagCouchException.php       The SagCouchException class. You don't need to
                                include it.

src/SagCache.php                The interface that all caching mechanisms
                                extend. Include one of this interface's
                                implementations instead of this file.

src/SagFileCache.php            Caching mechanism that uses the local file
                                system.

src/SagMemoryCache.php          Caching mechanism that uses PHP objects in
                                memory. Reported cache sizes are only
                                semi-accurate, but are less important than file
                                caching.

src/SagConfigurationCheck.php   A bootstrap file that Sag uses to make sure the
                                environment will work with Sag. There is no
                                reason you would need to call this directly,
                                unless writing your own bootstrap scripts.

src/SagUserUtils.php            A set of utilities for interacting with CouchDB
                                users and the _users database.

tests/                          The unit tests for Sag. You can ignore these
                                files, though SagTests.php may be interesting
                                for examples.

Error Handling
--------------

Sag's paradigm of simplicity is carried into its error handling by allowing you
to send data to CouchDB that will result in errors (ex., malformed JSON). This
is because CouchDB knows when there iss an error better than Sag. This also
makes Sag more future proof, instead of worrying about each of CouchDB's API
changes. Therefore, Sag will only look for PHP interface problems and issues
that are native to PHP, such as passing an int instead of a stdClass.

All errors are floated back to your application with Exceptions. Sag does not
catch any errors itself, allowing your application to care about them or not.

There are two types of exceptions: 

SagException            For errors that happen within Sag, such as an invalid
                        type being passed to a function or being unable to open
                        a socket to the server.

SagCouchException       For errors generated by CouchDB (ex., if you pass it
                        invalid JSON). The CouchDB error message will be put
                        into the Exception's message ($e->getMessage()) and the
                        HTTP status code will be the exception's code
                        ($e->getCode()).

You can catch these two types of exceptions explicitly, allowing you to split
your error handling depending on where the error occurred, or implicitly by
simply catching the Exception class.

Networking
----------

Sag allows you to specify the HTTP library you want to use when communicating
with CouchDB. The supported libraries are:

  - Native sockets (Sag::$NATIVE_HTTP_ADAPTER) - used by default. Prevent
    dependencies, such as cURL, that shared environments may not support.

  - cURL (Sag::$CURL_HTTP_ADAPTER) - has functionality that native sockets do
    not support, such as SSL.

You can choose which library you want Sag to use by calling the
setHTTPAdapter() function and passing it the appropriate variable.

If you want to monitor your application's activity on the server side (ex., if
you are proxying requests to CouchDB through a web server), then examine the
HTTP User-Agent header.

Results
-------

When you have told Sag to decode CouchDB's responses (the default setting),
they are stored in an object, breaking out the HTTP header lines and data. For
example, running `print_r($sag->get('/1'));` (where '/1' is the location of a
document) would give you something like this.

``
stdClass Object
(
    [headers] => stdClass Object
        (
            [_HTTP] => stdClass Object
                (
                    [raw] => HTTP/1.0 200 OK
                    [version] => 1.0
                    [status] => 200
                )

            [Server] =>  CouchDB/0.10.0 (Erlang OTP/R13B)
            [Etag] =>  "1-4c6114c65e295552ab1019e2b046b10e"
            [Date] =>  Mon, 12 Apr 2010 23:01:39 GMT
            [Content-Type] =>  text/plain;charset=utf-8
            [Content-Length] =>  68
            [Cache-Control] =>  must-revalidate
        )

    [body] => stdClass Object
        (
            [_id] => 1
            [_rev] => 1-4c6114c65e295552ab1019e2b046b10e
            [foo] => bar
        )

)
''

HTTP protocol information is stored in $result->headers, its headers broken out
as entries in the headers array - the "_HTTP" array element holds the basic
HTTP information in raw form ($result->headers->_HTTP->raw), and then broken
out into HTTP version number ($result->headers->_HTTP->version) and status code
($result->headers->_HTTP->status).

The $result->body property holds the raw data from CouchDB, which you can have
Sag automatically decode into PHP objects with json_decode().

If you've told Sag to not decode CouchDB's responses, then it'll only return
the resulting JSON from CouchDB as a string (what would have been in the body
property if you had set decode to true). None of the HTTP info is included.

If CouchDB specifies Set-Cookies, then they will be stored in $result->cookies
as a stdClass.

Functions
---------

Detailed documentation of the functions and API are available at 
http://www.saggingcouch.com/documentation.php.

License
-------

Sag is released under the Apache License, version 2.0. See the file named
LICENSE for more information.

Copyright information is in the NOTICE file.

More?
-----

See http://www.saggingcouch.com for more detailed information, bug reporting,
planned features, etc.