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)

Creating a project structure


The following is the folder structure of our app:

  • blog/: App root created earlier

  • bin/: Specific command line tools of our blog app

  • config/: Configuration files of our app

  • data/: The SQLite database will be stored here

  • src/: All PHP classes we write will be here

  • vendor/: This is where Composer (see the following section) stores all downloaded dependencies including the source code of Doctrine

  • bin/: This is a command-line tool provided by dependencies installed with Composer

  • web/: This is the public directory that contains PHP pages and assets such as images, CSS, and JavaScript files

We must create all these directories except the vendor/ one that will be automatically generated later.