Because it makes business sense!  If you could cut your business data application development cycle down by as much as 90%, and enable one full-stack developer to do the work that typically would need 3 or more specialists (database developer + back-end web services developer + front end web developer + QA for each).  That’s what I call a good set of reasons.  And … with very little downside.

Rapid Application Development (RAD) tools have been around for many years and in all different computing eras, from mainframe to minicomputer, and client server to web.  Powerbuilder was one of my favorites from the early days of client/server because it was so amazingly fast to build bug free Windows applications talking to complex enterprise grade SQL databases.  On the mini platform, I had many great times working with PACE on the Wang VS. They both did a full round trip soup to nuts rapid application build, taking care of all the plumbing in a tight yet flexible and extensible way that hasn’t really been equalled since.   And that meant that our QA was focused on did the application meet the business requirements?  Not on did a page or window render correctly!  Not only was our development cycle faster, cheaper, better, but we had a fraction of the QA people needed too.  Usually the business analyst/requirements team could do the needed QA.

But aren’t RAD tools just CRUD assemblers?  No. absolutely not.  Simple CRUD tools like Rails, or PHP Cake are better described as skeletons that you can edit with any text editor, and they save you some effort.  But you are still writing a lot of code by hand.  Code libraries are simply that too… libraries you incorporate in your code.

PHPRunner, and its sibling product ASPRunner, from XLineSoft, essentially inspect your database tables and relations and can generate a fully functional “80%” application in minutes.  The editing tool makes it full round trip, as you simply edit the fields using simple editors to choose fields on pages, set security options, change field labels in multiple languages, and so on.  then hit “build”, and you are done again.

And fully customizable too.  You have a full set of events that you can place your code in, and in several years working with PHPRunner, i have yet to find it lacking in appropriate events to put code, whether javascript or PHP.

It comes with jQuery embedded, so that’s easy to tap into for any custom DOM tweaking, or Ajax manipulations.  Although those are rarely needed.

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There are lots of ways you could approach this, if your needs are very specific. But I wanted a generic way of displaying some context sensitive user help in my PHPRunner applications. I have several PHPRunner projects that are using the same database, and the same help information.

Here were my requirements:-

• accessible from a simple “Help” top level menu item at all times so I dont have to edit every single page that needs help
• No matter which screen’set’ was active, the help menu item should open a new tab/window with the help content relevant to that screen set
• I wanted to add the very bare minimum of application or PHP code to each app/project that was to use the help feature. Ideally, each screen set would set a help page ‘name’ as a session variable and that would be it
• All code related to the help activity would be limited to the menu item, and then by the target help application. I did not want to have to write custom help code in every application
• Ideally the target help ‘application’ would be a PHPRunner project because it would be easy to create and be pretty much ‘bug free’ taking care of all the normal rendering / html housekeeping. i.e., I could have written a custom PHP external page, but I wanted to try a couple of other techniques too
• I wanted the help page content to be in a database table so that my subject matter experts could edit the page content, and do some basic formatting.  Essentially, enable it so that you didnt have to have PHPRunner editor to change static pages inside an application! Okay… busted… make it so that I didn’t have to edit help pages…

Challenges! And therefore what this tutorial will demonstrate!!

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