Maggie Nelson

In your slides I saw this code example:

DQL complicated example
static function sort2dBySubLength($arr, $key, $order){
foreach($arr as $sub) $sc[] = count($sub[$key]);
$order = $order == ‘desc’ ? SORT_DESC : SORT_ASC;
array_multisort($sc, SORT_NUMERIC, $order, $arr);
return $arr; }

I am trying to understand what it is for? It says it is a DQL example?

I must admit I am partial to Doctrine and thats the PHP ORM I know best, which is why I didn’t understand the point of your complex Doctrine example?

To me the two most important aspects of Doctrine is that I can write my queries as one string in DQL and more importantly, that the DQL is not only aware of the relations of the various objects, but that I can actually inject logic into DQL from my model. I am not sure if this is offered in any other PHP ORM.

I’m very interested to read your blogs on all of these different ORMs. I’ve checked out quite a number of the big ones, but you’ve got quite a few here I’ve never heard of before such as Xyster, dOrm, PHPLing, Outlet and ORMer.

I threw my hat into the PHP ORM ring back in late 2008 with Flourish (http://flourishlib.com). It is a modular general-purpose PHP5 library, but the ORM is definitely one of the more advanced parts. I’m interested to see how it compares to some of these other ORMs.

Great job on the presentation. Wish I could have been there.

One comment: Zend_Db_Select isn’t part of an ORM layer (it’s not even worth calling it object-oriented). It’s a class to help you build SELECT queries — procedurally.

Your example showing how an extensive use fo Zend_Db_Select is less readable than a literal SQL query. This misses the point. I never suggested using Zend_Db_Select when you can more easily just write out the complete SELECT query.

Instead, Zend_Db_Select is the alternative to writing meticulous and error-prone code when you’re building up a SELECT query dynamically, using complicated application logic. You know, adding SQL clauses and conditions a bit at a time by concatenating strings together.

I do recommend writing literal SQL when possible, and I wrote this recommendation in the docs for Zend_Db_Select.

There is one more ORM for PHP:
LightOrm http://sourceforge.net/projects/phplightorm

Thanks :)

Just a note, too, symfony isn’t an ORM – it just uses third party ORMs (Propel, Doctrine, etc)

Just what I was looking for. Brief overview of php orms :) Thanks!

Bill – I also prefer writing SQL whenever possible (it’s not really that difficult!) I tried to talk about the idea in the PHP world that anything that has to do with the database is the ORM (much like I sometimes get called a DBA even if I just write some SQL). Classes that generate SQL are sometimes considered an ORM because, hey, there’s objects AND tables in one class! It must be ORM! :) This definitely isn’t the case, and I wanted to illustrate this by using a concrete example.

I’ve very glad there seems to be a lot of interest about ORMs in PHP – I am very curious to see what the PHP community will come up with over time to solve this problem. (Maybe we’ll do away with relational databases altogether? *gasp*)

As a propel user I’d like to point out that it no longer uses Creole. It now uses PDO for it’s database access.

Can you post some more examples of Domain Objects with Data Mappers done in PHP. In your slides you said that this was your favorite technique. Thanks