In the world of application development, some concepts are so fundamental they almost go unnoticed, despite powering nearly everything we interact with online. It all starts with CRUD: Create, Read, Update, and Delete. Certainly not the best sounding acronym! These four basic operations form the bedrock of almost every data-driven application, from social media platforms where you create posts and update your profile, to e-commerce sites managing inventories, or internal enterprise tools tracking crucial business data. We use it all the time without even thinking much about it. Understanding and implementing robust CRUD functionality is essential for any developer looking to build truly production-worthy software that interacts with a database.
From Theory to Production: The Project's Origin
While I've been fortunate to hold the software engineer title in my previous roles, my new role as a data engineer and application analyst didn't always offer extensive opportunities for hands-on development of new, impactful systems. Eager to continuously build and expand my experience, I sought out a project that presented a tangible, production-worthy need. This project allowed me to delve deep into application architecture and data interaction.
Architecting the Solution: PHP, Pentaho, and SQL Server
This led me to design a custom PHP web application. Its primary purpose was to integrate directly with our organization's open-source Pentaho reporting platform, which served as both our data warehousing solution and a powerful visual dashboard platform. The app pulled some of Pentaho's URL parameters and dynamically queried our Microsoft SQL Server data warehouse to access patient account information and display it directly in the web forms, enabling intelligent pre-population and validation.
The Proof of Concept: A Secure CRUD GitHub Project
However, for the purposes of this GitHub repository, I've distilled those core interactions down to a simplified, yet incredibly robust, basic CRUD application as a proof of concept. This project specifically focuses on demonstrating clean, secure, and effective data manipulation.
We don't want bad data passed to the database and we certainly want to protect against the classic SQL injection methods, which can destroy our data.
The Business Impact: Bridging a Critical Data Gap
At its core, the original, larger project addressed a critical business gap: the need to accurately calculate out-of-network payments for rehab patients. This was a custom data entry piece that we simply couldn't capture through our automated data pulls. This custom development project filled that necessary void. The validated data collected through this tool then seamlessly integrated into some of our most critical reports, which were reviewed by hospital CEOs and leadership, providing them with essential financial insights.
Test It Yourself: Deployment & Code
This GitHub project code works great and I deployed the app on a LAMP server configuration so you can test it yourself. All data is stored in a MySQL database, which is typical on most hosting platforms.
