Any of several marine snail species (genus Haliotis, family Haliotidae), found in warm seas worldwide. The outer surface of the single shell has a row of small holes, most of which fill in as the animal grows; some remain open as outlets for waste products. Abalones range from 4 to 10 in. (10–25 cm) across and up to 3 in. (8 cm) deep. The largest is the 12 in. (30 cm) abalone (H. rufescens). The shell's lustrous, iridescent interior is used in ornaments, and the large muscular foot is eaten as a delicacy. Commercial abalone fisheries exist in California, Mexico, Japan, and South Africa.

Learn more about abalone with a free trial on Britannica.com.

ORMer is a free, open-source (MIT License) object-relational mapping class written in PHP.

Features

The primary goal is to provide ORM functionality while keeping things easy on the developer. It makes no assumptions about table/field naming conventions and requires minimal configuration (no XML config files). For Sqlite2 and MySQL 5.1.x it provides automatic relation discovery through foreign keys.

The most exciting feature is the ability to specify additional stipulations when referencing related data (such as the orders associated with a particular customer). See the second line of code in the example below.

Example

// Pull user objects "where email='me@host.com'" $users = users::find()->where('email=:email')->parameter('email', 'me@host.com'); // Chain through to pull ordered products starting with "a" // the database contains the following tables: users, orders, order_products, products // order_products associates products with an order $products = $users->orders->order_products->products->where('product.name like "a%"'); // Loop over them and display their names foreach($products as $product) {

   echo $product->name;

}

External links

• Project Home Page
• More Examples