Torpor

Torpor is a state of decreased physiological activity in an animal, usually by a reduced body temperature and metabolic rate. Torpor enables animals to survive periods of reduced food availability. A torpor bout can refer to the period of time a hibernator spends at low body temperature, lasting days to weeks, or it can refer to a period of low body temperature and metabolism lasting less than 24 hours, as in "daily torpor".

Animals that undergo daily torpor include birds (even tiny hummingbirds, notably Cypselomorphae) and some mammals, including many marsupial species, rodent species (such as mice), and bats. During the active part of their day, such animals maintain normal body temperature and activity levels, but their metabolic rate and body temperature drops during a portion of the day (usually night) to conserve energy. Torpor is often used to help animals survive during periods of colder temperatures, as it allows them to save the energy that would normally be used to maintain a high body temperature.

Torpor (PHP)

Torpor is free, open source (under the MIT License) Object-relational mapping framework for PHP 5.1 and above. It is written entirely in PHP with limited reliance on standard XML extensions (and selected databases) and is independent of (and aims to be compatible with) any other PHP frameworks.

History

Torpor was started as an independent project in July 2009 and reached its first major release (1.0) on October 31 2009. It was originally created to automate the tedium of Object Oriented PHP CRUD operations, specifically the management of related object factories, collections, and useful patterns such as object state maintenance for just-in-time fetch and publish.

Concepts

Torpor uses an XML configuration file to control its features and options as well as describe the layout and relationships of the underlying repository. A generic "Grid" object type is used to represent any table (using database terminology) record instance, dynamically adapted to the contained Columns and relationship to other Grid types. This differs from many other PHP ORM implementations in that it does not generate any code, though it can be configured to represent different Grid types as dynamically-constructed classes (or as user-defined classes extending the base Grid class). This allows for central control and maintenance of all operations and adaptation to repository design changes.