Rather than worry about which other systems to integrate Ray with–which means you’re going to have to maintain separate development tracks for each integration, I would say it would be more practical and easier to integrate if you instead teach Ray how to communicate with other user databases. 123 Flashchat uses this approach and it works wonders–believe me. What they did was, they used XML to create some configuration files based on different database types. the configuration.xml would point to the xml file for each database system. For instance, if you wanted to connect to a MySQL database, you would be pointed to mysql.xml. Inside you would find something like this:
<?xml version=”1.0″ encoding=”UTF-8″?><Mysql>
<!–
Note: This configuration doesn’t take effect unless you set integrated-other-database to “Mysql” in fcserver.xml. If you haven’t set it like that, you don’t need to configure this file.
If you are using other Portal System or Forum System or something like that which is based on mysql database, if you want to enable users in these system to log in your chat room , you have to configure this file then.–>
<!– database-host
The hostname of the database server.–>
<database-host>localhost</database-host>
<!– database-name
The database name you’re using.–>
<database-name>dbname</database-name>
<!– database-user
The user name which is required to connect to the database.–>
<database-user>mydbusername</database-user>
<!– database-password
The password which is required to connect to the database.–>
<database-password>mydbpassword</database-password>
<!– user-table
The table to storage the user information.–>
<user-table>user_table</user-table>
<!– username-field
Column name of user name in the user-table.–>
<username-field>username</username-field>
<!– password-field
Column name of password in the user-table. –>
<password-field>password</password-field>
<!– enable-md5
It defines whether the password is encrypted with MD5.
On - encoded.
Off - not encoded .
Passwords in many portal systems and forum systems like php-nuke, post-nuke or phpBB, etc. are encrypted with MD5, thus you need to set this value to On.
–>
<enable-md5>Off</enable-md5>
</Mysql>With a configuration scheme of this type, you could connect to any MySQL database and use your existing username/password. The only other thing I would suggest to improve upon this, is to ad XML Tag Entries for Gender, and Age, and Photo–everything that would be in your existing system, so you’re not having to go look for it. It greatly simplifies the task of integration with other user databases.
Make Meaning Or Die
Well, our system also uses XML file to do the integration, but is a little more advnced, supporting different types of profile fields. With you system we can only support integration of username and password universally.
Current approach, described here - http://www.boonex.net/ray/wiki/RayIntegration
is a lot more powerful, yet more difficult to use, admittedly. So, we want to prepare pre-packed integration modules, which would include direction on how to integrate widgets into the site pages, and not only get the DB fields.
Hi Kink, was wondering if the database integration procedure you listed abouv would work with dolphin and oscommerce or zen-cart?