Overdrive is a datastore that can be used to access semi-structured data stored on a MySQL database via PHP. It will be using the underlying AJAX communication that is supported by the dojo APIs.

I looked through the existing dojo.data code and decided upon the architecture of overdrive. Overdrive will provide the functionlaity that is already offered by dojo.data API such as basic read write operations. In addition it will provide functions to overdrive specific functionality.

My initial implementation will be an API that will provide read-only functionality and will support only text strings. As development progresses I plan to provide support for additional data types which are supported by dojo. Then dojo.data.core.Identity functionality will be integrated with overdrive. Final implementation of the project will have both read and write operations.

One primary concern is how to represent semi-structured data in a relational database. For the moment I'm planning to use the scheme proposed by Brian Skinner in http://dojo.jot.com/WikiHome/SummerOfCode2007DojoDataProjects - i.e. Item, Attribute and Value scheme. Thus for each item stored in the database, each attribute and its corresponding value is stored in several rows of the database allocating one row for each attribute.