Introduction

This is the second in a series of posts on using the Google Cloud Datastore on PHP App Engine.
The code for the examples in this post is here: https://github.com/amygdala/appengine_php_datastore_example.

The previous post walked through the process of setting up your PHP App Engine app to connect with the Datastore, using the Google API client libraries.
It demonstrated how to create a test Datastore entity, and showed how to set up a “Datastore service” instance, using a DatastoreService class, to make it easier to send requests.

However, using the API client libraries, there is a fair bit of overhead in composing requests to the Datastore and processing the responses, and mapping entities to instances of classes in your app. So, in this post, we’ll define some classes to make it easier to create, update, and fetch Datastore entities.
We’ll define a `Model` base class, then show an example of subclassing it to map to a specific Datastore Kind.

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Introduction

In this post, we’ll show how to access the Google Cloud Datastore from a PHP App Engine app.

This is the first in a series of posts on using the Cloud Datastore on PHP App Engine.
The code for the examples in this post is here: https://github.com/amygdala/appengine_php_datastore_example. (Some of the files in this repo won’t be mentioned in this post, but will be referenced in the post that follows this one).

PHP on Google App Engine supports several alternatives as for a persistent store. One is the Cloud Datastore, a distributed, robust, fully managed, schemaless database, which supports transactions and scales automatically.
(If you have built App Engine apps for other runtimes, this is the same Datastore that you’ve used before; it now supports an HTTP interface as well).
This article assumes that you already have a basic familiarity with Datastore concepts.

There is not yet a native Datastore API for PHP on app engine. So, instead we’ll show how to use the Cloud Datastore API to connect to the Datastore from your PHP app.
First, we’ll show how to configure your app and associated Cloud Project so that your app will be able to connect to the Datastore.

Then, we’ll look at how to use the Google API client libraries as a basis for authenticating with the Datastore, sending requests, and receiving responses, and we’ll build a DatastoreService class to make connecting a bit easier.

Continue reading →