David Adams has published a recent post that wonders if ORM abstraction is a "pipe dream" when it comes to abstraction. ORM stands for "object relational mapper" and is commonly used as a layer between the application and a dta source to work with the data as objects, not directly with it. He instead investigates replacing the ORM layer with multiple instances of repository pattern-structured code to abstract thing even more.

I was recently introduced to the repository pattern, a type of abstraction and organizational technique. The idea being, create a repository for each of your models to retrieve and persist to and from. A supposed benefit of the repository pattern is the ability to abstract your ORM and create different implementations for Eloquent, Doctrine, Propel, etc. This abstraction intrigued me. I set off to put this idea into practice and see what it took. Here are my findings.

He looks into how Doctrine handles its entities and tries to mimic some of the logic, including the calls to "save" and "flush". He also looks at how to handle a few other common ORM-ish topics like relationships, validation and observers. Unfortunately, he hit a wall with his solution and wasn't able to figure out a good Repository-based solution.