Doctrine (PHP)

Doctrine
Stable release
2.5.4 / January 5, 2016 (2016-01-05)
Development status Active
Written in PHP
Operating system Cross-platform
Type Object-relational mapping framework
License MIT
Website www.doctrine-project.org

The Doctrine Project (or Doctrine) is a set of PHP libraries primarily focused on providing persistence services and related functionality. Its prize projects are an object-relational mapper (ORM) and the database abstraction layer it is built on top of.

One of Doctrine's key features is the option to write database queries in Doctrine Query Language (DQL), an object-oriented dialect of SQL.

Usage demonstration

Entities in Doctrine 2 are lightweight PHP Objects that contain persistable properties. A persistable property is an instance variable of the entity that is saved into and retrieved from the database by Doctrine’s data mapping capabilities via the Entity Manager - an implementation of the data mapper pattern:

 $user = new User();
 $user->name = "john1";
 $user->password = "doe";
 $entityManager->persist($user);
 $entityManager->flush();
 echo "The user with id $user->id has been saved.";

Doctrine 1.x follows the active record pattern for working with data, where a class corresponds with a database table. For instance, if a programmer wanted to create a new "User" object in a database, he/she would no longer need to write SQL queries, but instead could use the following PHP code:

 $user = new User();
 $user->name = "john";
 $user->password = "doe";
 $user->save();
 echo "The user with id $user->id has been saved.";

Features

Overview of Doctrine

One feature of Doctrine is the low level of configuration that is needed to start a project. Doctrine can generate object classes from an existing database, and the programmer can then specify relations and add custom functionality to the generated classes. There is no need to generate or maintain complex XML database schemas, as seen in many other frameworks.

Another key feature of Doctrine is the ability to optionally write database queries in an OO (object oriented) SQL dialect called DQL (Doctrine Query Language) inspired by Hibernate's HQL. Alternately, the QueryBuilder class (Doctrine_Query in Doctrine 1.x) allows one to construct queries through a fluent interface. These interfaces provide developers with powerful alternatives to SQL which maintain flexibility and still allow for switching of database back-ends, without requiring any code duplication.

Writing queries explicitly however is not always necessary, as Doctrine performs joins and fetches related objects automatically. Small projects can be easily constructed without writing queries.

Other notable features of Doctrine are:

History

Doctrine was started by Konsta Vesterinen, also known as zYne-. The project's initial commit was made on April 13, 2006. As the project became more mature, the adoption began to pick up. Before long, the community was active and development was receiving regular contributions, among others from the Google Summer of Code project.

Doctrine 1.0.0 was released on September 1, 2008.[1]

The first stable version of Doctrine 2.0 was released on December 22, 2010, after 2.5 years of dedicated development starting in early 2008.[2]

Influences

Doctrine has been influenced by dozens of projects and many different people. The largest influences have been the Java ORM Hibernate and ActiveRecord from Ruby on Rails. Both of these ORM solutions have implemented a fully featured solution in the Java and Ruby languages. The purpose of the Doctrine project is to build an equally powerful solution for the PHP language for high-load websites that have to maintain constant flow of visitors. Doctrine ORM can be used to improve performance of such websites.

Community

See also

References

  1. ↑ Doctrine 1.0.0 released
  2. ↑ Doctrine 2 First Stable Release

External links

This article is issued from Wikipedia - version of the 10/4/2016. The text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution/Share Alike but additional terms may apply for the media files.