Book Image

Persistence in PHP with Doctrine ORM

By : Kevin Dunglas
Book Image

Persistence in PHP with Doctrine ORM

By: Kevin Dunglas

Overview of this book

Doctrine 2 has become the most popular modern persistence system for PHP. It can either be used as a standalone system or can be distributed with Symfony 2, and it also integrates very well with popular frameworks. It allows you to easily retrieve PHP object graphs, provides a powerful object-oriented query language called DQL, a database schema generator tool, and supports database migration. It is efficient, abstracts popular DBMS, and supports PHP 5.3 features. Doctrine is a must-have for modern PHP applications. Persistence in PHP with Doctrine ORM is a practical, hands-on guide that describes the full creation process of a web application powered by Doctrine. Core features of the ORM are explained in depth and illustrated by useful, explicit, and reusable code samples. Persistence in PHP with Doctrine ORM explains everything you need to know to get started with Doctrine in a clear and detailed manner. From installing the ORM through Composer to mastering advanced features such as native queries, this book is a full overview of the power of Doctrine. You will also learn a bunch of mapping annotations, create associations, and generate database schemas from PHP classes. You will also see how to write data fixtures, create custom entity repositories, and issue advanced DQL queries. Finally it will teach you to play with inheritance, write native queries, and use built-in lifecycle events. If you want to use a powerful persistence system for your PHP application, Persistence in PHP with Doctrine ORM is the book you.
Table of Contents (12 chapters)

Prerequisites


To follow this tutorial, we need a proper CLI installation of PHP 5.4 or superior. We will also use the curl command to download the Composer archive and the SQLite 3 client.

Note

For further information about PHP CLI, curl, and SQLite, refer to the following links: http://www.php.net/manual/en/features.commandline.php, http://curl.haxx.se, and http://www.sqlite.org

In the examples, we will use the PHP built-in web server and SQLite as DBMS. Doctrine is a pure PHP library. It is compatible with any web server supporting PHP, but is not limited to Apache and Nginx. Of course, it can also be used in applications that are not intended to run on web servers, such as command-line tools. On the database side, SQLite, MySQL, PostgreSQL, Oracle, and Microsoft SQL Server are officially supported.

Thanks to the DBAL component, our blog should work fine with all these DBMS. It has been tested with SQLite and MySQL.

The Doctrine project also provides Object Document Mappers (ODM) for NoSQL databases including MongoDB, CouchDB, PHPCR, and OrientDB. These topics are not covered in this book.

Note

Do not hesitate to consult the Doctrine documentation specified in the following link while reading this book: http://www.doctrine-project.org