Extreme Oracle... some background

For around 6 months now I've been working on an XP project that uses PHP talking to an Oracle database. When the project started we were a new team that had come from a number of different backgrounds, but really we fell into two camps: PHP and Oracle.

Now I've been an Oracle guy for about 6 years, always working on enterprise scale systems: a lot of retail management and a bit of patient management. Up until this job it had always been Oracle front end, Oracle back end, and a system that had grown over many, many years. Definately not XP.

So XP is new to me. Test driven development is new to me. Releasing often is new to me. Hell, systems that actually do what they're supposed to do and happy customers are new me. But whilst they're new to me, at least I now know that they exist... and I can't imagine a life without them.

Now one of the most profound things happened to me when I started working on these projects. I realised that Oracle development, as I've known it, isn't particularly well thought out. That the software I've always worked on is pretty badly designed with no clear strategy on how to build it. That doesn't mean that build standards haven't existed, they have, and have been pretty good for what they do. They've covered variable naming conventions and code layout, commenting strategies and cursor use guidelines. A lot of the standards made sense and some of them I still use today. But none of them covered how to actually organise code, and which techniques to use in order to make code actually useful.
I realised that readable code isn't the same as understandable code, and it definately isn't the same as good code.

And so our project started and we, as a team, started to think about how we should use Oracle in an XP, object oriented minded way. We coded a little, we learnt a little more, we refactored loads, and we coded some more. We went round the loop quite a few times. We did this whilst coding and delivering systems, and we're still doing it now. I think we've reached a point where we have a pretty good idea how things can fit together.

Admitted, a few of these rules may be particular to PHP and Oracle...