What's your experience with Doctrine ORM? [closed]

Question

What's your experience with doctrine? I've never been much of an ORM kind of guy, I mostlymanaged with just some basic db abstraction layer like adodb.

But I understood all the concepts and benifits of it. So when a project came along that needed an ORM I thought that I'd give one of the ORM framework a try.

I've to decide between doctrine and propel so I choose doctrine because I didn't want to handle the phing requirement.

I don't know what I did wrong. I came in with the right mindset. And I am by no means a 'junior' php kiddie. But I've been fighting the system each step of the way. There's a lot of documentation but it all feels a little disorganize. And simple stuff like YAML to db table creation just wouldn;t work and just bork out without even an error or anything. A lot of other stuff works a little funky require just that extra bit of tweaking before working.

Maybe I made some soft of stupid newbie assumption here that once I found out what it is I'll have the aha moment. But now I'm totally hating the system.

Is there maybe some tips anyone can give or maybe point me to a good resource on the subject or some authoritative site/person about this? Or maybe just recommend another ORM framework that 'just works"?

Answer 1

I have mixed feelings. I am a master at SQL only because it is so easy to verify. You can test SELECT statements quickly until you get the results right. And to refactor is a snap.

In Doctorine, or any ORM, there are so many layers of abstraction it almost seems OCD (obsessive/compulsive). In my latest project, in which I tried out Doctrine, I hit several walls. It took me days to figure out a solution for something that I knew I could have written in SQL in a matter of minutes. That is soooo frustrating.

I'm being grumpy. The community for SQL is HUGE. The community/support for Doctrine is minuscule. Sure you could look at the source and try to figure it out ... and those are the issues that take days to figure out.

Bottom line: don't try out Doctrine, or any ORM, without planning in a lot of time for grokking on your own.

Answer 2

I think mtbikemike sums it up perfectly: "It took me days to figure out a solution for something that I knew I could have written in SQL in a matter of minutes." That was also my experience. SAD (Slow Application Development) is guaranteed. Not to mention ugly code and limitations around every corner. Things that should take minutes take days and things that would normally be more complicated and take hours or days are just not doable (or not worth the time). The resulting code is much more verbose and cryptic (because we really need another query language, DQL, to make things even less readable). Strange bugs are all around and most of the time is spent hunting them down and running into limitations and problems. Doctrine (I only used v2.x) is akin to an exercise in futility and has absolutely no benefits. It's by far the most hated component of my current system and really the only one with huge problems. Coming into a new system, I'm always going back and forth from the db to the entity classes trying to figure out which name is proper in different places in the code. A total nightmare.

I don't see a single pro to Doctrine, only cons. I don't know why it exists, and every day I wish it didn't (at least in my projects).