Quite often I find myself overwhelmed by the amount of news I try to consume on a daily basis. Often the result, unfortunately, is that my brain shuts down to some extent and I find it hard to prioritize the things I really want to investigate. For example, ever since the January 2008 edition of PHP | Architect, in which there was an article about The Doctrine Framework, I have been trying to find the time to dig in. On the way into work today I made the decision that, on a weekly basis, I would begin investigating things that interest me. This week of course is devoted to Doctrine.

Introduction

What is Doctrine? According to the website:

Doctrine is a PHP ORM (object relational mapper) for PHP 5.2.3+ that sits on top of a powerful PHP DBAL (database abstraction layer). One of its key features is the ability to optionally write database queries in an OO (object oriented) SQL-dialect called DQL inspired by Hibernates HQL. This provides developers with a powerful alternative to SQL that maintains a maximum of flexibility without requiring needless code duplication.

Ok, sounds good to me. Let’s get started. (more…)