This weekend, I decided to give Doctrine a shot. Since Propel is the default ORM layer, I never really looked at Doctrine before. But reading on the subject got me interested. Luckily their is already a nice Doctrine plugin available for Symfony, so the switch went smooth, without any problems.
I have to admit, that I was losing my mind in the beginning. I had to get used to the new syntax, and all the new possibilities of Doctrine just blew me away.
I made a backup of a running project developed in Propel (1.2) and just started refactoring the schema and changing the code. It’s been almost 5 days, and I wouldn’t go back to Propel at all. Even for the 1.3 version (where people say that it is even faster then Doctrine) . There are plenty of reasons why to stick with or switch to Doctrine, and to be honest, even those slightly speed increases of Propel 1.3 just can’t compete with them.
For those that are still not sure, just check out the Doctrine Documentation. You will find everything you want, with some nice examples. And for some implementations in Symfony, you can download a Doctrine version of Askeet somewhere on the forum (I know it helped me a bit).
The project is going along nicely. I can’t say much yet, but I’ll keep you informed when it is almost finished. Their is still a lot of work to do, but I’m getting their, and with the help of Symfony and Doctrine, it just can’t go wrong.
Well, it’s been getting late, and after spending 15 hours behind the computer, I want to spent a few hours before the tv screen to relax.
I’ll explain later in detail what made me switch to Doctrine. In the mean time, let me know what you think about Doctrine or Propel and why you are using that specific ORM.
