WJBlog

Doctrine: Object Relational Mapping for Your PHP Development

Because of the relational database’s pivotal role in driving Web applications, a great deal of time and effort has been put into creating tools that not only simplify the task of mapping database tables to a programming language’s object-oriented class structure, but also facilitate the management of your data and schemas over the project lifecycle. The Java and .NET communities have benefited from two such solutions in particular for years, namely Hibernate and NHibernate.

The PHP community also has a powerful database integration tool at their disposal: a project known as Doctrine. This open source project was inspired by Hibernate and Rails’ Active Record implementation, and both the symfony and Zend frameworks have adopted it as a primary database solution. This article introduces Doctrine and shows you how to begin mapping your database tables to PHP objects.

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