Because I see you still have to write the queries and view, why is it better than simply writing a PHP PDO query and outputting the HTML for the chart/data?

Latitude is a code-based solution, so there's no UI. In the future we might provide a web interface to build views that get persisted in our code framework, but for now we wanted to focus on the coding experience. I'm not familiar with PHP PDO but comparing Latitude to most backend frameworks we make things more simple and fast to code. Some of the main features we provide:

- Ready made UI components for charts, inputs and buttons

- Parametrised queries with template syntax and control flow (if/else, for loops..)

- Automatic caching layer for faster performance

- Automatic API: you write an sql query and it gets automatically exposed in its own API endpoint