IMHO, you have two... er, three options if you want to avoid homebrewing something:
- SQLite
If you're familiar with PDO, you can install a PDO driver that supports SQLite. Never used it, but I have used PDO a ton with MySQL. I'm going to give this a shot on a current project.
- XML
Done this many times for relatively small amounts of data. XMLReader is a lightweight, read-forward, cursor-style class. SimpleXML makes it simple to read an XML document into an object that you can access just like any other class instance.
- JSON (update)
Good option for smallish amounts of data, just read/write file and json_decode/json_encode. Not sure if PHP offers a structure to navigate a JSON tree without loading it all in memory though.
