Unireg and Automatic Database UI Generation

Back at the MySQL Users Conference, I was talking to Monty about a good PHP* interface to MySQL that would go through a database, and make pages to be able to search, update and add new fields in the database. He mentioned Unireg, and I wrote it down, but only got to checking out what that was recently.

As far as I can tell from here, here, here and here:

• Unireg started as a curses-based interface to an SQL database.
• Unireg turned into MySQL -- that is, libraries and such from Unireg were used in MySQL, and Unireg was no longer developed
• Unireg was similar to the MySQL Query Browser or any number of administration tools, but it also generated reports

Of course, I could be misunderstanding the information on these pages, or they could be wrong, so feel free to correct me.....

It's not quite what I was talking about, but it's an interesting history lesson. Even more interesting is how functionality that [I gather] used to be in Unireg took a long time to get into MySQL, and in the case of reporting, still is not in there.

I used PHPCodeGenie for the one system I did not hand-code, and even that was painful, with lots of code. I did a bit more research, and found lots of stuff that have huge learning curves, and I have not overcome that obstacle yet.

So what is your favorite program to automatically generate a database ui? Specifically, it should:

• Generate web pages in PHP*,
• Automatically connect to the database,
• Allow for easy specification of join tables based on (a) field(s),
• Allow for easy selecting of all, none, or some table fields,
• Not require that fields in the join condition be shown.
• Allow the "view", "edit" and "add" pages to show different fields

I do not even need the application to have authentication, as for what I am doing I do not need ACLs and a .htaccess file will suffice.

* or really, any lightweight structure -- Perl would be OK, Java might be OK if it did not middleware like JBoss or Resin -- basically anything I could stick on a web server to connect to a database.